
Enrico Castellani
4 May – 23 June 2002
Enrico Castellani is one of Italy’s most celebrated living artists.
Focusing on his work from 1958 – 1970, the exhibition explored Castellani’s fascination with the dynamics of space and light. His series of large monochromatic reliefs, with their characteristic alternation of points and punctures, create rhythmic surfaces of enormous purity and beauty.
With Piero Manzoni, he founded the hugely influential, though short-lived, magazine Azimuth, and the gallery Azimut, which were revolutionary in their impact upon Italian art. In his 1965 Manifesto of Minimalism Donald Judd identified Castellani, with Yves Klein, as the two most important European precursors of minimalism and conceptualism. Together with Fontana’s “slashes”, Castellani’s surfaces in relief constitute one of the most outstanding stylistic developments of the period.