ENRICO CASTELLANI

Biography

Born in Castelmassa, Rovigo, in 1930 Enrico Castellani passed away in Celleno in 2017. In the early ‘50s he studied art and architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Belgium and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, very soon starting an artistic practice on the border between painting, sculpture and architecture, searching for a new paradigm. An active member of the new Milan scene in the late 50s, he co-founded with friend Piero Manzoni the magazine Azimuth in 1959 and the almost homonymous Azimut gallery, proposing a total zeroing of the previous artistic experience. In that year Enrico Castellani produced his first extroflected surface by probing the potential of the canvas under maximum tension: “Black Surface”. The white followed to the black, with its shadows and lights and the serial repetition of compositional rhythms, thus inaugurating a poetics of the “different repetition”. “White is not a color for me, but its absence. In my works I tend to be as objective as possible. The works exist for themselves, they are not meant to transmit any message”.

Enrico Castellani showed his works all around the world, among the personals exhibitions held in institutions: Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Étienne (2012), Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (with Günther Uecker, 2012), Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome (2006), The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (2005), Prada Foundation, Milan (2001), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento (1999), Palazzo Fabroni Arti Visive Contemporanee, Pistoia (1996). Among the most prestigious collective exhibitions in institutions: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2018), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Palazzo Grassi, Venice and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008), Centro Luigi Pecci, Prato (1998), Guggenheim Museum, New York and La Triennale, Milan (1994), Reina Sofia Art Center, Madrid (1990), Museum of Contemporary Art – Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1984), Centre Georges Pompidou , Paris (1981), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1965, 1962), Palazzo Querini-Stampalia, Venice (1963), Städtisches Museum, Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen (1960).

Numerous the international events in which he took part, such as: Venice Biennale (2003, 1993, 1984, 1966, 1964), Documenta IV (1968), Sao Paulo Biennial (1965). In 2010 he received the highest honor in the field of arts from Prince Hitachi, Honorary Patron of the Japan Art Association: the Imperial Praemium for Painting. Since 1997 Galleria Fumagalli of Bergamo inaugurated three solo exhibitions dedicated to Enrico Castellani. The first in 1997 was accompanied by a catalog with texts by Annamaria Maggi and Marco Meneguzzo. The second in 2001 was followed by a publication documenting the artist’s work from 1959 to 2000; in the same year, in co-ordination with Galleria Niccoli of Parma, Fumagalli also proposed the anastatic reprint of the two issues 1959-60 of Azimuth magazine. The third solo show was held in 2006 and in 2011 Castellani took part in the collective exhibition “ACMN. Giovanni Anselmo, Enrico Castellani, Maurizio Mochetti, Maurizio Nannucci “, of which the catalog was published in 2018.

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Biography