Viewing Room

Enrico Castellani | Sculpture

Opening 31 August 2021
4 Passage Saint-Avoye, Paris

#CastellaniSculpture

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Lévy Gorvy is pleased to present Enrico Castellani | Sculpture, an exhibition of aluminium cast wall sculptures by Enrico Castellani (1930–2017), traveling from the gallery’s London location. Opening 31 August 2021, this will be the first presentation in France of the sculptures that preoccupied the late Italian master during his later years.

Completed between the years of 2006 to 2013, the works in this exhibition suggest important links to the artist’s earliest experiments in metal, and evince his skill in pushing the boundaries of materiality and space. From the early 1960s onward, Castellani experimented with brass, zinc, bronze, and other plastic or ductile materials capable of being modelled for small groups of works. The catalyst for his late aluminium series was an abiding interest in mirrored surfaces and his experiments using glass with a silver interior.

While deceptively similar to his paintings, Castellani’s wall-based sculptures, weighing between 20 and 350kg, have a distinctive presence and create extraordinary visual experiences for the viewer through their surfaces and the ways in which they occupy space. Seen together for the first time, these works spotlight the enduring radicality of Castellani’s approach, and serve as both climax of and coda to decades of his tireless experimentation in the iterations of his renowned ‘Surfaces’ works.

Highlights of the exhibition include Superficie nera (2006), a rare black example from the series that encapsulates Castellani’s preoccupation with space, surface, and materiality and Superficie argento (2006), a dramatic nine-panel work. These are juxtaposed with historical works from the 1960s and 70s, for example Spartito (1969/2004), one of Castellani’s remarkable assemblages where the interleaving of hundreds of papers sheets creates a biomorphic form. An untitled standing sculpture comprising four scales from 1973 further embodies the force of Castellani’s decades-long investigation into positive and negative space, and his ambition to establish a potent artistic language that continues to influence younger generations of artists today.