A few months after his death, MAXXI dedicates an exhibition to Giovanni Anselmo

A few months after his death, MAXXI in Rome is dedicating an exhibition to Giovanni Anselmo (Borgofranco d’Ivrea, 1934 - Turin, 2023): it is entitled GIOVANNI ANSELMO. Beyond the Horizon, is open to the public from June 20 to October 6, and is the result of a prestigious collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The exhibition, curated by Gloria Moure, is a comprehensive focus on Giovanni Anselmo’s research, as well as the last one he designed before his death last December and, for this reason, constitutes an important part of his artistic legacy. It is a journey through Giovanni Anselmo’s career from the 1960s to the present to recount the creative approach of an artist who actively and with great sensitivity investigated the energies, forces and dynamics that govern the universe.

From the Guggenheim in Bilbao, GIOVANNI ANSELMO. Beyond the Horizon thus lands in Rome, in the Zaha Hadid-designed museum, completely redesigned for Gallery 5, the most scenic of MAXXI’s galleries and a suitable place to fully unleash the powerful relationship between Anselmo’s work and the architectural space in which it is exhibited.

Between the visible and the invisible, the works in the exhibition give back to the public the portrait of an artist linked to the group of the Poveristi, but who at the same time has been able to detach himself from any label by creating his own artistic alphabet, which in physicality, in the concepts of space and time as well as in the wide range of means and elements used has found its characterization.

Alessandro Giuli, President Fondazione MAXXI: "After the great group show Ambienti 1956 - 2010, which just in these days reached a record of attendance establishing itself as MAXXI’s most visited art exhibition ever, we are confident that also this monographic exhibition, dedicated to an extraordinary artist like Anselmo, will meet the enthusiasm of our public.

We are thus continuing a new season, which began under the best auspices and under the sign of prestigious collaborations with other cultural institutions in Italy and around the world, which - like the Guggenheim Bilbao on this occasion - are increasingly choosing to place their name alongside that of the National Museum of 21st Century Arts."

Gloria Moure, exhibition curator: “With Anselmo we realize that the human condition is, so to speak, the artistic condition, because individuals have no choice but to continually redefine their environment, relativizing and questioning previously established conventions.”

Francesco Stocchi, MAXXI Artistic Director: "Conceived as a workshop, the exhibition offers a dynamic reading of Anselmo’s oeuvre as a whole, an action that in the viewer results in sharing. In placing the works in direct relationship with Zaha Hadid’s architecture, the exhibition presents a unique landscape relationship to restore, using terminology dear to the artist, a ’situation of energy’ free to act.

Even before entering the exhibition, the attentive visitor will not miss some unexpected incursions of the work Particular (1972 - 2024), a wall-mounted light projection that, as in an unknown path, surprisingly appears in passing places of the Museum, thus tracing the itinerary leading to the entrance of Gallery 5. Images from Identifications: Giovanni Anselmo (1970) and Etcétera (1995)-one of the rare interviews granted by the artist to Televisión gallega-mark the last stretch of the suspended corridor from which the exhibition is accessed. Accompanying the visitor throughout the experience will be Anselmo’s voice and words chosen for the catalog, as well as some wall interventions.

Welcoming the visitor before crossing the threshold will be the document of an experience My Shadow Toward Infinity from the Top of Stromboli during the dawn of August 16, 1965 (1965), recounted by Anselmo himself as a mere souvenir, a postcard, a photograph of a moment that became a work in the instant it happened and that marked an inescapable milestone in his artistic career. The entrance, which seems to be emphasized on the right wall by the sixteen drawings that make up Particular of Infinity (1969 - 79), is in a large open space, “inhabited” by some of Anselmo’s most famous works: Direction (1967), Entering the Work (1971) on loan from the MART in Rovereto, Three Hundred Million Years (1969), For an Engraving of Indefinite Thousands of Years (1969), The Panorama with Pointing Hand (1982 - 84), Right Side (1970), Everything (1973 - 2024), Untitled (Eating Structure) (1968), and his last work made in 2023, While Toward Overseas the Color Raises the Stone.

Continuing toward the stained-glass window, enclosed between Direction (East) and Direction (North) from 1967 - 1978, a group of works from the 1960s, including Torsion (1968), on loan from GAM in Turin, and the work Fade (1970).

Untitled (Drinking Structure) from 1968 and to the left of the stained-glass window three large stone slab elements of the work Untitled, from 1988 - 1990, conclude the itinerary.

In addition to loans from major museums, the 30 works in the exhibition come largely from the artist’s own collection and from important private collections throughout Europe. stories:

Accompanying the exhibition is a series of interdisciplinary dialogues with scientists, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists on certain key words inherent in Anselmo’s research: Gravity, understood as a physical force and also as a principle that unites the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible; Magnetism, a phenomenon through which the artist works on the concept of orientation, tension and infinity; and Crisis, read as a moment of potential transformation that contains within itself the energy of change. Scheduled for September in the videogallery is the screening of the docufilm Arte Povera - Notes for History (2023), a Sky Arte production directed by Andrea Bettinetti. The documentary is one of the most up-to-date accounts dedicated to the most subversive movement in Italian art, tracing its genesis through the words and memories of its major protagonists.

The Education Office will accompany visitors around the exhibition through guided tours in Italian and English. It will be possible to listen to Anselmo’s words through the new multimedia audioguide system Nubart (info and reservations edumaxxi@fondazionemaxxi.it).

The catalog, published by Poligrafa editore 2024 and published on the occasion of the exhibition, traces the path of Giovanni Anselmo from the 1960s to his last works with an extensive narrative that spans the artist’s entire career and brings together historical images, essays, a critical biography and a selected bibliography.

For all information, you can visit MAXXI’s official website.

Pictured: Giovanni Anselmo, Detail (1972). Ph. credit: Paolo Mussat Sartor, courtesy Archivio Anselmo ETS.

A few months after his death, MAXXI dedicates an exhibition to Giovanni Anselmo

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