Enrico Castellani

Enrico Castellani was born in Castelmassa, Rovigo, on August 4, 1930. In 1952 he moved to Brussels, where he attended courses in painting and sculpture at the Académie des Beaux Arts and in 1956 he graduated in architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre. He returned to Milan and began working in an architectural studio until 1963. In 1959 he created his first relief surface. With Piero Manzoni he takes part in the experiences of the Zero group and, to show his own work and make known that of other artists moved by similar tensions, he founds the magazine "Azimuth" and the homonymous gallery where, in 1960, he holds his first solo show . In that same year he exhibited three surfaces in relief at the "Monochrome Malerei" exhibition at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen and, with Manzoni, exhibited at the Galleria la Tartaruga in Rome; in 1962, again with Manzoni, he exhibited at the Galerie Aujourd'hui in Brussels and participated in the "Nul" exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1963, in Milan, he exhibited with a personal exhibition in the Galleria dell'Ariete, in 1964 he proposed three canvases at the XXXII Venice Biennale and participated in the Guggenheim International Award in New York. In 1965 one of his large white Surfaces was present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the exhibition "The Responsive Eye", and other works represented Italy at the Sao Paulo Biennial, and at "Trigon 65" at the Burggarten/Palmenhaus in Graz. In 1966 he exhibited in a personal room at the Venice Biennale for which he received the Gollin Prize, stayed for a period in the United States and created the works he would exhibit in his first solo exhibition in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1967 he was invited to build an environmental work for the exhibition "The space of the image" in Palazzo Trinci in Foligno, partially destroyed after the exhibition he will create a second version in 1970 as part of "Vitality of the negative in art Italian 1960/70” at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. After a moment of exile in Switzerland, in 1973 he returned to Italy and moved to Celleno, a small village in the province of Viterbo. The importance of his work is recognized and consecrated internationally. The occasions in which he shows his work in the last decades of his life are rare and therefore the one-man shows and anthologies at Lia Rumma in Milan in 1999 (with which he inaugurates the Milanese space of the gallery) must be remembered; at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2001; at Kettle's Yard in the University of Cambridge and at Galerie Greta Meert in Brussels in 2002; at the Galerie Di Meo in Paris in 2004; at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 2005; again by Lia Rumma in Naples in 2006; and at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in New York in 2009 and 2012. On October 13, 2010 Castellani received the Praemium Imperiale for painting. The artist died in Viterbo on 1 December 2017.