Overview
Enrico Castellani (b. Castelmassa, Italy, 1930 – d. Celleno, Italy, 2017) was a pivotal voice in the post-war European avant-garde, and a key precursor to Minimalism. Working at the intersection of painting, sculpture and architecture, he sought to dissolve the constraints of the canvas, transforming it from surface to structure. His monochromes – rigorously white, silver, black – were not painted in the usual sense, but shaped from behind using nails, wooden struts and other hidden supports to create a field of undulations: light and shadow in disciplined motion.
For Castellani, the painting became an object in space, its rhythm dictated by protrusions and recessions, its meaning embedded in repetition, silence, and restraint. These works resist spectacle, instead inviting the viewer into a slow, perceptual encounter – an experience at once optical and meditative.
In 1959, alongside Piero Manzoni, Castellani co-founded Galleria Azimut in Milan, and the accompanying journal Azimuth, positioning the city as a nucleus for the ZERO movement. Their efforts offered a radical alternative to both gestural abstraction and traditional figuration, marking a new beginning for European art.
Castellani’s work is held in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MACRO, Rome; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. He represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1966, 1984 and 2003.