Enrico Castellani is regarded one of Italy's most important living artists.

Born in Castelmassa in 1930, he studied art and architecture at Belgium's Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Rispettivamente.

In the early 1950s he began challenging the confines of painting, sculpture, and architecture in search of a new paradigm. A catalytic figure in the European post-war avant garde, he founded the Azimut gallery and the related journal Azimuth in Milan in 1959 with Piero Manzoni. They organized international exhibitions and published essays that opposed the dominant art movements in Europe at the time, promoting the idea of ​​an art that did not imitate but instead sprang self-referentially from its own techniques and materials.

In 1959 Castellani exhibited his now celebrated living black pieces for the first time. To make them, he worked his monochrome canvases with a nail gun to produce a relief-life surface that induced light and shade effects through alternating depressions and raised areas.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he expanded his approach to include other materials; but Castellani's focus upon a poetic marriage of painting, sculpture, architecture, and space has never wavered. Castellani has exhibited at prestigious museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

He represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and in 2010 became the first Italian artist ever to receive the Praemium Imperial for Painting.

Acrylic on shaped canvas
47,2 x 47,2 x 4 in (120 x 120 x 10 cm)