Giovanni Anselmo: Beyond the Horizon

Curator: Gloria Moure / Exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is opening Giovanni Anselmo. Beyond the Horizon, a comprehensive analysis of the artistic practice of Giovanni Anselmo (b. 1934, Borgofranco d’Ivrea; d. 2023, Turin) envisioned as a path or a journey that connects the most emblematic works in Anselmo’s career with other site-specific pieces and reveals the powerful relationship between Anselmo’s oeuvre and the architectural space in which they are exhibited.

By age and conviction, Giovanni Anselmo belonged to the generation of the 1960s, when artistic circles were experiencing an atmosphere of change that anticipated the advent of a new humanism fostered by the exhaustion of the deterministic paradigm that had dominated Western culture for more than a century. Thus, a number of artistic approaches emerged throughout that decade which questioned the rationalist idea of progress in order to revamp existing creative approaches and seek new forms of expression. Concepts like instability, randomness, indeterminacy, interdependence, and complexity came to the fore and shook the very foundations of all artistic disciplines. Likewise, for this generation of creators, art became a powerful tool targeted at appreciating, measuring, and understanding the landscape, as well as actually shaping it. This meant that contemplation had to be replaced by experience, that artworks could not be considered independent of their environment, and that interaction among things was more important than their individual substance. Anselmo’s creative approach congealed on these aesthetic foundations.

Giovanni Anselmo. Beyond the Horizon brings together more than 40 works (drawings, sculptures, photographs, projections, and site-specific pieces), which survey the creative approach of an artist who actively and perceptively presented the surrounding energies and the incommensurable nature of the forces and dynamics governing the universe. The show offers the opportunity to learn about the broad range of mediums and materials used by the Italian artist, as well as the recurring themes that defined his artistic vocabulary, such as space, time, orientation, magnetic fields, and the planet’s gravitational forces.

Giovanny Anselmo was deeply involved in the conception of this exhibition until just a few days before his death last December. This is why now more than ever, the goal of Giovanni Anselmo. Beyond the Horizon is to faithfully convey the depth of his vitality, the grandeur of his legacy, and the significance of his contribution.