Enrico Castellani biography

Enrico Castellani was an Italian painter. He was born in Castelmassa, in the province of Rovigo, in 1930. From his youth he dedicated himself to studies of art, sculpture and architecture and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts . In 1952 he moved to Brussels where he studied painting at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and where, in 1956, he obtained a degree in architecture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre.
In 1957 he returned to Italy, to Milan, where he immediately became part of the Lombard artistic scene, establishing friendships especially with Piero Manzoni with whom he established an artistic partnership and founded the magazine Azimuth. Together with Manzoni and Bonalumi he elaborates a new artistic experience through the creation of monochrome canvases everted with various techniques. In particular, Enrico Castellani creates his extroflections through the use of nails and ribs inserted behind the canvas in order to obtain what critics have defined as a different repetition.
He participates in the Biennial of Venice in 1964, in 1966 with a personal room, in 1984 and 2003. In 1965 he participated in the collective The Responsive Eye at the MoMA in New York and at the VIII Biennial of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
In 1970 he took part in the collective Vitality of the negative in Italian art, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome . In 1981 he took part in Identité Italien. L'art en Italie depuis 1959, curated by Germano Celant, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1983 he was at Palazzo Reale in Milan for the exhibition Arte Programmata e kinetica 1953-63 . In 1994 he was invited to the exhibition The Italian metamorhosis at the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Among the most recent exhibitions we remember the personal ones in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan in 1999 and those in the Galleria Fumagalli in Bergamo in 1997 and 2001. In 2001 he was invited to the group exhibitions Materia/Niente at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and at Belvedere italiano - Trend lines in contemporary art 1945/2001 at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. An important anthological exhibition curated by Germano Celant was set up at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2001.
On 13 October 2010 Enrico Castellani received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, the highest artistic recognition at an international level.
Enrico Castellani died in Celleno, a small town in the province of Viterbo, in 2017.