The son of an industrial technician, Castellani enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels to study painting and sculpture before leaving to pursue a degree in architecture at the city’s École de La Cambre. When he graduated in 1956, he took a clerical position at an architecture firm in Milan. There, he found resonance in the optimistic, liberated spirit of experimentation among the city’s artists, including Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni.Castellani’s early writings confirm his major artistic influences: Kazimir Malevich, for his anti-object sensibility; Vladimir Tatlin, for his spatial awareness; Constantin Brancusi, for his rhythmic plasticity; and Piet Mondrian, for his rigorous geometries. In September 1959, Castellani and Manzoni established the short-lived but influential Galleria Azimut, where Castellani would mount his first solo show, and the publication Azimuth. Associating with Düsseldorf’s Group Zero, the artists sought to turn away from the dominant European approaches of Tachisme and art informel, and their endeavors secured Milan as an epicenter for ZERO, the vanguard international network of artists who dedicated themselves to reconceiving art’s relationship to light, space, and flux. Just as his ZERO peers were fascinated with natural phenomena, Castellani turned to the modulation of light, harnessing its visual and tactile potential.

After over a decade of material experimentation and active participation in Milan’s art world, Castellani settled in the small hamlet of Celleno, Italy, in 1973, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. The 1970s brought increased institutional attention, starting with his first retrospective at Università di Parma’s Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione in 1976. While the purview of his practice expanded to include a variety of materials and formal concerns, his pursuit of a poetic coalescence of painting, sculpture, and architecture never wavered. Neither did his drive to expand the artistic context he saw himself in. Since the ‘00s, the global import of Castellani’s work has been noted through exhibitions that have paired him with Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Günther Uecker (Haunch of Venison, London, 2009); Fred Sandback (Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, 2010); Richard Long and Jeff Wall (Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, 2014); and Lee Ufan (Lorenzelli Arte, Milan, 2015), among many others.

In the early 1960s, Castellani’s work was featured prominently in a number of ZERO exhibitions, including tentoonstelling nul (known as Nul 62) and nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig (known as Nul 65), both at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1962 and 1965, respectively), and Group Zero at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1964). He was included in The Responsive Eye, the Museum of Modern Art’s popular survey of Op art in 1965, and he had his first solo exhibition in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1966. Castellani represented Italy at the Venice Biennales of 1964, 1966 and 1984, and he was featured in documenta 4, Kassel, Germany, in 1968. His work was also featured in the significant surveys Identité Italienne: L’Art en Italie depuis 1959, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1981), and The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994). In 2001, the Fondazione Prada in Milan organized a major solo exhibition of his work and in 2010 he became the first Italian artist to receive the Praemium Imperiale award for painting from the Japan Art Association. Castellani’s work was centrally featured in ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, a 2014–15 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as in the similarly themed ZERO is INFINITY at the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo, 2020. Works by Castellani can be found in the collections of major public institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Lévy Gorvy has presented several exhibitions of Castellani’s work in New York and London, including Local History: Castellani, Judd, Stella in 2014–15, Enrico Castellani: Interior Space in 2016, Remembering Enrico Castellani: Redefining Space in 2018, and Castellani: Sculpture in 2021. Our publication Enrico Castellani features an interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, offering meaningful insight into the themes and concepts that informed his oeuvre. Having had the privilege of working directly with the artist since the gallery’s inception, Lévy Gorvy continues to champion Castellani’s legacy in close collaboration with the Fondazione Enrico Castellani.