ENRICO CASTELLANI (1930 – 2017)
ARTISTS
Enrico Castellani, born in the province of Rovigo, studied art, sculpture, and architecture in Belgium, graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure in 1956. He returned to Italy the following year and settled in Milan, becoming an active figure in the emerging avant-garde. Here he developed close collaborations with Piero Manzoni, Agostino Bonalumi, and Lucio Fontana, engaging in a fertile exchange of ideas at the heart of the new Italian artistic scene.
After early works influenced by American Action Painting, Castellani sought a radical new beginning. Together with Manzoni, he founded the magazine Azimuth and pursued an art that reset previous models in favor of a renewed relationship with contemporary society. This research led to his celebrated estroflessioni: monochrome canvases shaped from behind with nails, wooden structures, or metal elements, creating rhythmic patterns of light and shadow. These works, begun in 1959, defined his rigorous visual language—what critics have called a “different repetition”—and secured his place as a key figure in postwar abstraction. Donald Judd famously referred to Castellani as a precursor of Minimalism.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Castellani continued to explore relief surfaces, spatial rhythm, and the perception of time, producing also rare but significant works on paper and several large-scale environments, such as Ambiente bianco (1967) and Il muro del tempo (1968).
His career includes major exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including multiple participations in the Venice Biennale (1964, 1966—solo presentation, 1984, 2003), The Responsive Eye at MoMA (1965), and The Italian Metamorphosis at the Guggenheim Museum (1994). Today, Castellani’s works are among the most sought-after in the Italian postwar market and are featured in numerous prestigious public and private collections.