Enrico Castellani

ENRICO CASTELLANI Castelmassa, 1930 – Celleno, 2017

Castellani studied art, sculpture, and architecture in Belgium at the Academie des Beaux Arts until 1956 when he graduated in Architecture from the Ecole Nationale Superieure. The following year, he returned to Italy and settled in Milan. There, he became an active figure in the new artistic scene, establishing friendships and collaborations with Piero Manzoni, with whom he formed an artistic alliance that intrigued commentators of the time due to the contrasting nature of their personalities. While Manzoni was volcanic, unconventional, and playful, Castellani was serious, refined, and contemplative. Culturally fruitful relationships were also cultivated by Castellani with Agostino Bonalumi and Lucio Fontana. After initial experiences in an informal style, likely inspired by American Action Painting and particularly by Mark Tobey, with the collaboration on the magazine Azimuth, which they founded in 1959 with Piero Manzoni, he developed a "new beginning" and conceived a complete reset of his previous artistic experience based on a new pact with social progress. This concept of radical renewal was realized by Manzoni, Castellani, and Bonalumi through the use of monochromatic canvases (often entirely white), manipulated with various techniques to create effects of shifting lights and shadows depending on the inclination of the light source. It was an entirely original experience considered of fundamental importance in the history of 20th-century Abstract Art. In the same year, Castellani and Manzoni inaugurated the Azimut Gallery in Milan, where exhibitions of Italian, French, and German artists were organized from 1960 onwards, united by the pursuit of an Art whose rigorous and analytical process contrasted with dominant tendencies from Abstract Expressionism to Informal Art. While Piero Manzoni chose kaolin and cotton as his preferred materials for his famous "Achromes," Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi embarked on a rigorous path of studying and analyzing the possibilities offered by the protrusion of the canvas using nails, frames, and wooden and metal shapes placed behind it. Castellani's works, starting with "Superficie nera a rilievo" (1959), are considered by many critics to possess extreme purity, where the carefully selected repetition of solid and empty spaces created by rhythmic protrusions of the canvas constitutes an ever-new path. Even in his works on paper, Castellani manages to achieve his very personal style of rhythmic protrusions. The artist participated in numerous internationally renowned exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1966, and 2003, documenta in Kassel in 1968, "The Responsive Eye" at MoMa in New York in 1965, the exhibition "Identité Italienne" at the G. Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, and "The Italian Metamorphosis" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1994-1995. Among the numerous exhibitions dedicated to him, the Biennale of São Paulo in Brazil in 1965 and the exhibition curated by Germano Celant at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2001 are noteworthy. Castellani's works are among the most sought-after and expensive in the Italian 20th-century art market, with prices reaching millions of dollars, regularly sold at prestigious auctions during the renowned "Italian Sales" in London and New York. On October 13, 2010, he received the highest recognition in the field of art, the "Praemium Imperiale," considered the Nobel Prize of Art, presented by the Japan Art Association under the patronage of the Emperor of Japan.