Reviewing a 1989 solo show for The New York Times, the critic Michael Brenson described Mr. Anselmo’s art as a commentary on the “paragone,” a Renaissance-era debate among Italian masters about the relative supremacy of sculpture and painting. He was making “works outside painting and sculpture that comment on both,” Mr. Brenson wrote, in order to “relieve the weight of his artistic past in ways that help that past remain alive.”
In “Torsione,” a four-and-a-half-foot cube of cement now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a series of leather straps embedded in the work’s top surface wrap around a long wooden pole, which is braced against a wall. It’s hard not to imagine the pole swinging free, and in that sense one could almost call the piece a kinetic sculpture, if only in theory.
“It is Anselmo’s unique achievement to have fused perceivable and imperceivable realities within his art,” Anne Rorimer, a former curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who has lectured on Mr. Anselmo’s career, said in an interview.
Giovanni Anselmo, one of four children, was born on Aug. 5, 1934, in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, Italy. He spent most of his life in nearby Turin and later divided his time between there and Stromboli. Before turning to conceptual sculpture, he was a self-taught painter and worked as a graphic designer.
Mr. Anselmo had a wide-ranging and markedly successful career that included numerous international exhibitions and appearances at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at the Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion Award in 1990.
He was represented by the Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan and, for nearly 40 years, by Marian Goodman. He had recently participated in a group show, with Giulio Paolini and Giuseppe Penone, that traveled from Paris to Milan. In October, his installation “Orizzonti” (“Horizons”), consisting of four blue lights that indicate the cardinal directions, opened in Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin. A retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain is planned for next year, as is a major Arte Povera show featuring his work, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
