Giovanni Anselmo was born in Borgofranco d’Ivrea (IT) in 1934. He passed away in 2023 in Turin (IT).

Giovanni Anselmo is one of the legendary artists who founded the Arte Povera movement, so called by the art critic Germano Celant in 1967.
Anselmo’s artistic research is based on the use of different materials and the possibility to suggest through them the physical and immaterial energies that animate the artwork. He works on the combination of materials which, due to their characteristics, enter in dialogue or conflict with each other, generating a tension between the work and the surrounding space. Organic and inorganic, natural and technological, hot and cold, light and heavy are some of the dialectical couples the artist works with; the cohabitation and reconciliation of opposite materials and phenomena extends on the conceptual plane, where Anselmo investigates the relationship between finite and infinite, visible and invisible.

Giovanni Anselmo believes in the visible of the matter and in the invisible of the energy in the artwork itself, shown through the effects of his action. “Most of the reality is invisible and the visible things give us the possibility of deducing the invisible” said the artist. This concept is traduced in gestures of extreme rigor and simplicity.