Enrico Castellani

Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Sotto Voce, 2008, n.p., illustrated

Renata Wirz and Federico Sardella, Eds., Enrico Castellani, Catalogo Ragionato, Vol II, Milan 2012, p. 596, no. 1042, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals evidence of light handling towards the extreme outer edges. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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As a seminal figure in post-war European art-history, Enrico Castellani has over the past five decades redefined our understanding of painting through an extensive exploration of its physical space. After Lucio Fontana, who was Castellani’s mentor, had redefined pictorial space by breaking up the picture plane through slashes and holes in the canvas that created a simultaneously real and illusionistic space beyond its immediate surface, Castellani extended the canvas back into the physical space of the viewer. In dialogue with his European contemporaries, but also with American artists such as Donald Judd and Frank Stella, Castellani was one of the key artists who blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and radically redefined our understanding of medium specificity.

Having founded the Azimut Gallery in Milan with Piero Manzoni in 1959, Castellani was at the centre of the post-war European avant-gardes. After the heavy art-informel of the previous generation, this new wave of artists proposed an alternative understanding of art, which, like their American contemporaries, was increasingly self-referential. Symbolism and heavy painterly styles were abandoned in favour of a more pure approach to art-making that asserted the individual materiality and objectivity of the work, which resonated with a whole generation of artists - from Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in Germany, to Yves Klein and the Nouveaux Realistes in France, and Castellani’s own contemporaries in Italy: Agostino Bonalumi, Paolo Scheggi, Turi Simeti. Many of these artists were extremely experimental, and reacted against established traditions not only aesthetically, but also in their relentless experimentation with materials. New mediums were introduced and historical materials re-purposed in unexpected ways, with Castellani championing the use of nails to twist an ancient material into captivating new compositions.

Over the following decades Castellani continued to explore the poetic potential of his newfound compositional device  with incessant energy, continually pushing the infinite potential of the seemingly exhaustive paradigm of monochromatic painting to new levels. Despite the minimalist treatment of colour, Castellani’s paintings possess a subtle lyricism and poetic quality that give them a timeless appeal. With its sumptuously rhythmic pattern and elegant monochromatic appearance, Superficie Bianca is a truly outstanding example of Castellani’s late work and his iconic white paintings, in which "light illuminates the reliefs, creates shadows and reflections, flattens and highlights the surfaces, and thus confers existence on the painting”, as Germano Celant observes, concluding that the artist “could not fail to gradually approach its splendour through the use of the absolute colour white, which radiates, slides across and unifies the surface and at the same time functions as a register of total freedom" (Germano Celant quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Milan, Fondazione Prada, Enrico Castellani, 2001, p. 17).