SOMETHING BORROWED | ANSELMO

Something Borrowed is the social column about the travels of the works of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT that are loaned from Turin to Museums all over Italy and the World. Follow them with us on Instagram, Facebook e Linkedin.

The Foundation is proud to announce the loan of two works by the artist Giovanni Anselmo (1934-2023), on loan from the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rivoli-Turin, to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to celebrate the uniqueness of his production, fundamental to the Arte Povera movement.

The works Respiro (1969) and Interferenza nella gravitazione universale (1969-2016) are now on display in the exhibition project and will contribute to the dissemination of Italian artistic culture abroad through the dialogue between the two institutions.

The exhibition “Giovanni Anselmo: Beyond The Horizon”, curated by Gloria Moure, brings together the most important works from Anselmo’s career with other works created especially for the occasion. It is intended to be a journey, a continuous flow. Anselmo was instrumental in organising this exhibition until a few days before his death last December. The title, which translates as ‘Beyond the Horizon’, faithfully conveys the depth of his vitality, the size of his legacy and the importance of his contributions.

The exhibition traces the rich artistic production and will be open until 19 May 2024.

Artist bio

Although his early artistic investigations emerged within the pictorial discipline, Anselmo immediately sought to reject a nostalgic approach to creating a painting, which he saw as a space apart, separate from the artist’s sensibility. As Jean-Christophe Amman relates, Anselmo said: “It is true that the painting has its fascination, but it excludes you, you remain alone with your emotions.” There is a well-known story of how the artist, walking one day at dawn at the summit of Stromboli, had a clear perception of the infinite realm of which, from that point on, all his works would become components. Unlike what occurs outside the closed imaginative plane of the canvas, the fulcra of energy created through his installations include everything within themselves: artist, viewer, cosmic geometries. No element remains isolated in the solitude of its finite reality. Everything is reorganized in relation to the positioning of the work’s elements, and the work responds to the trajectories and lines of energetic tension of earth and sky. […]

Link to the full bio.