The most formative experience in the life of the Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo, who has died aged 89, came during a dawn visit to Stromboli, one of the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily, in August 1965. Standing near the summit of the volcano, above the rising sun, he saw that he had no shadow. He realised then that it had been cast not on to the ground but invisibly into the ash-laden air. “My own person,” he later said, “via the invisible shadow, came into contact with the light, the infinite.”
This extraordinary expression of an ordinary event led to the work Shadow Towards the Infinity of the Peak of Stromboli During Dawn, August 6, 1965, whereby Anselmo drew geometric lines emerging from his image into the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper, and determined his subsequent sculptures and installations, through which he explored the most fundamental natural phenomena: gravity, magnetism, biological growth and decay.
His themes and use of raw materials were characteristic of the radical arte povera movement of the late 1960s and 70s which was given its name by the critic and curator Germano Celant, but the artworks that Anselmo produced were idiosyncratic, to say the least.
Anselmo adopted some of the “poor”, unconventional media favoured by peers such as Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz, but it was granite, in all its hard mineral splendour, that he found best suited to his quasi-scientific aims. Heavy slabs, hung precariously high on a gallery wall, would demonstrate the power of gravity while apparently defying it, and Direzione (1967-68), a block of stone fitted with a compass and shaped like an arrowhead, converted inert matter, as if miraculously, into a symbol of movement and magnetic force.
His flair for bizarre juxtapositions was most evident in Structure That Eats (1968), where two pieces of granite were tied around a lettuce which, if not regularly replaced, would decay, bringing the whole edifice crashing to the ground. By creating a sculpture that required regular meals, Anselmo not only managed to give an inanimate object a semblance of life but also made his viewers aware of biological transformations too gradual to be perceived in a single visit.
In the following year he achieved a comparable effect with the physical process of friction by leaning a post against a wall that was coated with a film of oil. Ultimately, of course, the insulation would wear out, but only in some distant future: a timescale slightly exaggerated by the title, Towards a Groove in an Indefinite Number of Millions of Years.
Born in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, a small town about 50km from Turin, the city where he would spend most of his adult life, Anselmo taught himself to paint and embarked on a conventional artistic career until, after the episode on Stromboli, he abandoned oil on canvas for roughly hewn stone and other more prosaic materials.
This change of direction attracted some attention, and in 1968 Anselmo was given his first one-man show, at Galleria Sperone in Turin, as well as appearing in an arte povera exhibition at the Galleria de’ Foscherari in Bologna.
Forever fascinated by the unimaginable concept of infinity, in the early 70s Anselmo experimented with projecting a slide of the word in various galleries, so that it was either lost, as if in space, or focused on to the bodies of visitors to these spaces.
At the Galleria Sperone in 1972 he did the same with a word of almost opposite meaning – particolare (detail) – and in 1990 performed the same trick in Berlin, as his contribution to a series of artistic manifestations that celebrated, however obliquely, the destruction of the Wall.
Like many conceptual artists, Anselmo saw writing prim0arily as a system of visual signs with shifting meanings dependent on scale and context. In 1969 he produced a book, Details of the Infinite, in which the letters were so greatly enlarged that their outlines and the gaps between them became just a pattern of tonal contrasts deprived of their normal significance. By 1990 another publication had shrunk the word Lire (to read) to an almost microscopic size before blowing it up so that the final pages were simply fields of black ink, quite unintelligible except in relation to the sheets that preceded them.
In 1999, he revived yet another image that he had first created decades earlier: Cut Sky was a black column, just over a metre high, erected on a river island at Pontevedra in Galicia. Its title, inscribed on the top, succinctly captured the mystical aim that Anselmo shared with earlier artists: the desire to bring Earth and heaven closer to each other, to make the abstract concrete – in the words of William Blake, to “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour”.
He continued to exhibit widely throughout his career, including on three occasions in the Venice Biennale, at which he was awarded the Golden Lion in 1990, in solo shows at institutions around the world and at his gallery, Marian Goodman, with whom he most recently appeared in London in 2017; and was involved in many major surveys, such as Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-72 at Tate Modern in 2001.
He received the Presidente della Repubblica award from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rome in 2019. A retrospective, Giovanni Anselmo: Beyond the Horizon, opens at the Guggenheim Bilbao in February 2024.
His wife, Alda, survives him, as does a sister, Sally, and a brother, Armando.
• Giovanni Anselmo, artist, born 5 August 1934; died 18 December 2023
