Giovanni Anselmo - Leggere - 2016

Skira's exhibition catalog accompanies, in a special boxed edition, the limited edition reissue of 500 copies of Leggere by Giovanni Anselmo (1971) (first edition Sperone Editore - Editarte, Turin 1972); a rare artist's book in which the word "leggere" is progressively reproduced in type that first becomes ever smaller until it disappears, and then in ever larger characters, until it vanishes into absolute black.

As one of the early artists to exhibit at the Castello di Rivoli when the Museum opened in 1984, Giovanni Anselmo began his involvement with Arte Povera in the late 1960s, engaging in a search aimed at highlighting the constant dialogue between the visible and the invisible. The visible materials to the viewer are natural elements and industrially produced objects, often seemingly humble—light projectors, magnetic needles, granite stones, photographs, earth, and swaths of ultramarine color; among the invisible are magnetic fields, gravitational force, the space in which we are and orient ourselves. For these reasons, Anselmo's work is more timely than ever and of growing interest to younger generations who have grown up in an era of apparent immaterial virtuality. Conceived for the first solo exhibition of the artist at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, the catalog presents exhaustive essays by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Anne Rorimer and reprints the important text on the artist that Jean-Christophe Ammann wrote in 1979. In dialogue with the precise project devised by Anselmo for the spaces of the Manica Lunga of the Castello di Rivoli, the present volume includes in-depth texts by Marcella Beccaria, Maddalena Disch, and Ilaria Bernardi related to the individual works on display.