Enrico Castellani, 1930 Castelmassa

Together with Piero Manzoni, in 1959 Castellani founded the art gallery Azimut and a magazine called Azimuth. Also part of the artistic groups ZERO and NUL, between December 1959 and July 1960, Galleria Azimut presented thirteen exhibitions, including Castellani’s first solo exhibition, and the important group show La nuova concezione artistica (The New Artistic Conception). Castellani dedicated himself to experimenting with different methods, using nails under a stretched-out canvas to form a sort of dance between the light, angles and the shadows, a technique that would later become his signature style. Castellani and Manzoni’s joint projects in 1959–60 established Milan as an important centre of activity for ZERO, a rapidly expanding international network of artists committed to redefining art and engaging light, space, time, and movement.
From 1963 to 1970 he exhibited at a number of different galleries throughout Europe. It was also between these years that surface poetry began to give way to the subject with Castellani’s attention changing its focus to study more the formal articulations of the surface with his canvases becoming shaped, angular, diptychs and triptychs. In 1966 he won the Gollin prize at the Venice Biennale.
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