Dominique Lévy to Display Solo Exhibit by Enrico Castellani in February 2016
LONDON...Dominique Lévy is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in London by Enrico Castellani.
Opening at the gallery's Old Bond Street space in February 2016, the exhibition will explore the ways in which painting can occupy three-dimensional space by showcasing recent as well as historical works by the artist, with whom the gallery has worked since its inception in 2012. A selection of Castellani's large-scale shaped relief canvases Superfici Bianca(White Surfaces) will be on view, with examples spanning the artist's entire career. These will be juxtaposed with recent angular metallic paintings titled Biangolare cromata (Bi-angular Chrome) and Angolare cromata (Angular Chrome), the latter of which Castellani installs in corners. These white and metal-like works will be placed in dialogue with one another, highlighting the ambient light and shadow effects that occur as the works activate the architectural space in which they are situated-a concept that has played a key role in Castellani's oeuvre for decades.Castellani employs a highly systematized technique to execute the Biangolare cromata and Angolare cromata, which he first paints in black and then layers with alternating coats of resin and silver paint. This procedure results in a rich 'chromated' surface with an ever- changing and active reflective sheen as the viewer moves around them. The cromata paintings and the iconic white shaped surfaces of the Superfici bianca will be complemented in the exhibition by the never-before exhibited recent sculpture Spartito, in which Castellani references a seminal work made in 1969 by bolting hundreds of sheets of paper together with nails, creating a biomorphic minimalist form.
About the Artist
Enrico Castellani is regarded as one of Italy's most important living artists. Born in Castelmassa in 1930, he studied art and architecture at Belgium's Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, respectively, in the early 1950s and soon began a practice challenging the confines of painting, sculpture, and architecture in search of a new paradigm. A catalytic figure in the European postwar avant garde, he founded the Azimut gallery-and the related journal Azimuth -in Milan in 1959, with Piero Manzoni. They organized international exhibitions and published essays that opposed the dominant art movements in Europe at the time, and promoted the idea of an art that did not imitate but instead sprang self-referentially from its own techniques and materials. In 1959 Castellani also showed his now celebrated Superfice nera pieces for the first time. To make them, he worked his monochrome canvases with a nail gun to produce a relief-life surface that induced light and shade effects through alternating depressions and raised areas. In the 1970s and 1980s, he expanded his approach to include other materials; but Castellani's focus upon a poetic marriage of painting, sculpture, architecture, and space has never wavered. Castellani has exhibited at prestigious museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam. He represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and in 2010 became the first Italian artist ever to receive the Praemium Imperial for Painting.
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