ENRICO CASTELLANI

In 1957 he returned to Italy and settled in Milan, the nerve center of the contemporary art scene. Here he formed a close friendship with Piero Manzoni, with whom he shared artistic ideals and founded the magazine Azimuth, a reference point for the new Italian avant-garde. The partnership with Manzoni and the proximity to artists like Agostino Bonalumi led to the birth of a new movement that broke with the previous pictorial tradition. The painter Castellani immediately stood out for his investigation of space, rhythm, and surface.
After an initial phase influenced by American action painting and artists like Mark Tobey, Castellani embraced a new radical language. It was in 1959 when he created his first extroflexed surface, a work in which the canvas, shaped from the inside with nails and rigid structures, becomes no longer a support but the protagonist. This marked the beginning of a rigorous and coherent poetics that abandoned all figurative references and proposed a visual space made of changing lights and shadows, in continuous relation with the environment and the observer's perception.
Castellani's surfaces, often white or monochrome, reflect his idea of “different repetition,” where apparent uniformity hides a complex organization of solids and voids. His artworks became famous throughout Europe and beyond, leading him to exhibit at the Venice Biennale already in 1964, and again in 1966 with a personal room, in 1984 and in 2003. He was present at the MoMA in New York in 1965 in the famous exhibition The Responsive Eye, and at the São Paulo Biennale the same year.
Over the decades, Enrico Castellani's paintings and installations won over critics and collectors. His environmental artworks, such as White Environment (1967) and The Wall of Time (1968), extend the concept of painting by transforming space into a sensory experience. Alongside the paintings on canvas, he also created prints and serigraphs, tools with which he explored the same rhythmic dynamics of the extroflexions but in a more accessible and experimental way.
His art received prestigious recognitions over the years: in 2010 Castellani was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting, the highest artistic prize granted by the Japan Art Association. From the 1990s onwards, many galleries and museums dedicated retrospectives to his work, including the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim in New York, and numerous institutions in London, Moscow, and Tokyo. Despite international fame, Castellani always remained faithful to formal and conceptual rigor, avoiding any concession to passing fashions.
He died on December 1, 2017, in Celleno, in the province of Viterbo, where he had chosen to live and work in the last years of his life. Today, Castellani the painter is considered one of the purest and most coherent voices of European conceptual art.

Enrico Castellani artworks

In the vast panorama of contemporary art, the artworks of Enrico Castellani represent one of the most original and recognizable expressions of the second half of the twentieth century. The heart of his production is the famous extroflexed canvases, monochrome surfaces furrowed by reliefs and shadows that change according to the light and the observer's position. Their apparent simplicity hides a complex and meticulous construction, based on underlying structures that physically modify the canvas.
Each painting by Enrico Castellani presents itself as a living organism: the light refracted on the protrusions and depressions generates a visual rhythm made of silences and accents. White, the quintessential color in his production, is chosen not for neutrality but for its ability to maximize the play between light and surface. There are also works in black, silver, gold, and red, always treated with the same plastic and spiritual intention.
Alongside these, there are environmental artworks and installations — such as Score and Obelisk — that expand the research of space beyond the limits of the painting, and a small but significant production of serigraphs and prints, in which Castellani translates his poetics into lighter but no less evocative forms.
All these works reflect the vision of an artist who sought to annul the subjective gesture, surpassing the informal and opening the way to a mental painting, rigorous and at the same time vibrant with energy.

Enrico Castellani valuations

In the world of contemporary collecting, the valuations of Enrico Castellani are among the highest for an Italian post-war artist. His paintings on canvas, especially the monochrome extroflexed ones from the 1960s, have reached six-figure sums at the most prestigious international auction houses such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.
A medium-sized artwork (around 100x100 cm) can be worth between 60,000 and 100,000 euros, while large paintings (over 200 cm) can easily exceed 200,000 euros, depending on the year, technique, and provenance. Some historicized artworks have surpassed one million euros, especially if documented and present in catalogues raisonnés or institutional exhibitions.
The prints are positioned in a more accessible range, generally oscillating between 5,000 and 40,000 euros, while the serigraphs — often limited and numbered editions — range between 1,500 and 3,000 euros, with peaks up to 20,000 euros for particularly rare editions.
Key factors for the valuation of a Castellani artwork are: the year of creation (the closer to the beginnings, the higher the value), presence in important exhibitions, documentation, and authentication by the Castellani Archive. Those who own an artwork by the artist or intend to invest in his work must consider the importance of the artwork within the artist’s overall corpus and the degree of preservation. Enrico Castellani’s valuations continue to be supported by strong international demand and a stable market, making his artworks a benchmark in modern art collecting.