Enrico Castellani biography

Enrico Castellani was an Italian painter. He was born in Castelmassa, in the province of Rovigo, in 1930. From a young age, he dedicated himself to the study of art, sculpture, and architecture and attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. In 1952, he moved to Brussels where he studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and, in 1956, obtained a degree in architecture from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre.
In 1957, he returned to Italy, to Milan, where he immediately became part of the Lombard art scene, forming friendships especially with Piero Manzoni, with whom he established an artistic partnership and founded the magazine Azimuth. Together with Manzoni and Bonalumi, he developed a new artistic experience through the creation of monochrome canvases with various techniques. In particular, Enrico Castellani created his protrusions using nails and ribs inserted behind the canvas to achieve what critics have called a different repetition.
Participates in the Venice Biennale in 1964, in 1966 with a personal room, in 1984 and in 2003. In 1965, participates in the group exhibition The Responsive Eye at the MoMA in New York and at the VIII São Paulo Biennial in Brazil.
In 1970, he took part in the group exhibition Vitality of the Negative in Italian Art, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. In 1981, he participated in Identité Italien. L'art en Italie depuis 1959, curated by Germano Celant, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1983, he was at the Palazzo Reale in Milan for the exhibition Programmed and Kinetic Art 1953-63. In 1994, he was invited to the exhibition The Italian Metamorphosis at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Among the most recent exhibitions, we recall the solo shows at the Galleria Lia Rumma in Milan in 1999 and those at the Galleria Fumagalli di Bergamo in 1997 and 2001. In 2001, he was invited to the group exhibitions Materia/Niente at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa di Venezia and Belvedere italiano - Linee di tendenza nell'arte contemporanea 1945/2001 at the Centre for Contemporary Art di Varsavia. An important retrospective exhibition curated by Germano Celant was held at the Fondazione Prada di Milano in 2001.
On October 13, 2010, Enrico Castellani received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, the highest international artistic award, from Prince Hitachi, Honorary Patron of the Japan Art Association.
Enrico Castellani dies in Celleno, a small town in the province of Viterbo, in 2017.