DELLA TORRE Enrico

A fine line can suggest the course of the water, a luminous surface can preserve the memory of a landscape, and a small suspended form can evoke the movement of vegetation. The painting of Enrico Della Torre often arises from this transformation of natural experience into an abstract language, capable of bringing together poetic sensibility and compositional precision. Even when the image offers no immediate figurative references, it retains a deep connection with the observed world and the memory of places.

From Brera to the development of a personal language

Born in 1931 in Pizzighettone, in the Cremona area, Della Torre studies in Milan, graduating from the Brera Art High School in 1951 and the Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. His training allows him to pursue painting, drawing, and printmaking in parallel, without treating the latter as a secondary discipline. Among his teachers is Benvenuto Disertori, a highly skilled printmaker whose teaching helps instill in his student a particular attention to the quality of the mark. When he holds his first solo exhibition at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan in 1956, presented by Guido Ballo, he already exhibits paintings and prints: a choice that anticipates the continuity between these two fields throughout his career.

His engagement with the informal art movements of the postwar period gradually leads him away from naturalistic representation. The aim, however, is not to erase the landscape but to transform it. The area traversed by the Adda, with its banks, vegetation, and reflections on the water, remains an inner point of reference: impressions gathered through observing nature reemerge as rhythms, intervals, and relationships between forms. From the late 1950s onward, the compositions become increasingly essential, while the mark grows freer yet more measured.

Nature transformed into rhythm and light

In Della Torre’s mature work, often associated with lyrical abstraction, color and line no longer describe an identifiable place but instead convey a possible sensory experience of it. The forms seem to float across luminous fields, drawing closer or moving apart according to a subtle order; the void carries as much weight as the painted elements. This visual lightness comes from careful work with proportions, distances, and overall rhythm, not from improvisation.

The term lyrical abstraction helps clarify his position: his work does not depend on an immutable geometric grid, but neither does it abandon structure. Intuition and rigour go hand in hand. Even when more geometric formal arrangements appear in the 1980s, his exploration of an inner vibration in the image remains recognizable, as if each line could hold a trace of time and nature.

Printmaking and lithography: an independent pursuit

Original prints are essential to understanding Della Torre. The award he received in 1957 at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Italian Printmaking, in the lithography section, shows how early work on a matrix acquired independent significance. In his prints, the mark is not simply a black-and-white translation of a painting: the resistance of the matrix, the pressure, and the relationship between inked areas and the paper surface introduce specific expressive challenges. Lithography offers possibilities linked to the freedom of drawing, while intaglio processes allow for an exploration of the depth and quality of the engraved line.

Given the richness of this body of work, it is not accurate to assign the same technique indiscriminately to every work on paper. The distinction between lithography, etching, drypoint and other processes must be based on the cataloguing of each individual print. An important reference is the General Catalogue of Graphic Works 1952–2012, edited by Sandro Parmiggiani and published by Skira in 2012, which makes it possible to consider printmaking as a structural, rather than marginal, part of his career.

Exhibitions, recognition and continuity of artistic research

After receiving the San Fedele Painting Prize in 1960, Della Torre developed an exhibition career that took him across Italy and abroad, while maintaining a significant connection with the Milanese art scene. Notable milestones include the 1987 retrospective at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the 1989 exhibition at PAC in Milan. In 1999, he was named a National Academician of San Luca; in 2011, he took part in the 54th Venice Biennale. The Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings 1953–2020, published in 2022, documents the breadth and coherence of his work.

Della Torre, who died in Teglio in 2022, leaves behind a body of work in which painting and printmaking are in constant dialogue. His originality lies in having found a language capable of making the movement of water, the fragility of light and the persistence of memory perceptible without depicting them.