Enrico Castellani, born in 1930 in Castelmassa (Venezia), follows his art studies in Milan, then in Brussels until 1956. He graduates as an architect. He settles in Milan the following year and immediately becomes very active on the Italian art scene. His beginnings are connected to theories supported in the review Azimuth, which he founds in 1959 with Piero Manzoni; despite very different personalities, both men have a fruitful exchange association,...

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  Biography of Enrico Castellani

  Enrico Castellani, born in 1930 in Castelmassa (Venezia), follows his art studies in Milan, then in Brussels until 1956. He graduates as an architect. He settles in Milan the following year and immediately becomes very active on the Italian art scene. His beginnings are connected to theories supported in the review Azimuth, which he founds in 1959 with Piero Manzoni; despite very different personalities, both men have a fruitful exchange association, enhanced by close contact with artists such as Agostino Bonalumi and Lucio Fontana. In response to the informal abstraction, the first "light structures" of Enrico Castellani play on the lack of the making and the neutrality of the composition. The artist makes monochrome paintings consisting of a stretched canvas lift up or push in by nails arranged regularly and in a quinconcial way, as to create light effects and shadows changing with the inclination of the source. This is a completely original experience that is regarded as fundamental in the international history of abstract art of the twentieth century. The work of Castellani remains faithful to the original technique, is considered an extreme purity, the repetition of fullness and emptiness creates ever-new rhythms, intense and consistent. Enrico Castellani has participated in numerous exhibitions of international importance, among which we note the Venice Biennial (1964, 1966 and 2003), Documenta in Kassel in 1968 or the famous exhibition of Moma in New York "The Responsive Eye" in 1965 which brings together proponents of the optical and kinetic art (Yaacov Agam, Josef Albers, Julio Le Parc, Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Jesus Rafael Soto, etc.). Among the artist's personal exhibitions, we note the one held in the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1965 and, more recently, the retrospective that has been dedicated to him at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2001.
  The artist died on December 1st, 2017 to Viterbe (Italy), he was 87 years old.
  
  

  

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