Venice: Ca Pesaro – Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition

Venice: Ca Pesaro – Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition.  Two big masters of Contemporary Art, eminent representatives of the last generation of Gruppo Zero, who have never presented together in a museum exhibition, Günther Uecker / Enrico Castellani meet again after fifty years in this show, until January 13, organized at Cà Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice.   The exhibition proposes a selection of some of the most important historical works together with more recent ones. Curated by Davide Di Maggio and Lóránd Hegyi, the exhibition proposes a particular comparison between two different artistic contexts, the Italian and the German one:  two models of a systematic, Conceptual and Sensorial art.

Above: Gunther Uecker’s Sandmuhle, 1970, sand, wooden structure, motor.

Gunther Uecker

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Gunther Uecker.  Since 1966, after the group ZERO dissolved and a last joint exhibition, Uecker increasingly used nails as an artistic means of expression—he began hammering nails into pieces of furniture, musical instruments and household objects, and then he began combining nails with the theme of light, creating his series of light nails and kinetic nails and other works. Light and electricity continued to be one of the main subjects and natural materials such as sand and water were included in his installations, resulting in an interaction of the different elements to create a sensation of light, space, movement and time.

Above: Tisch, 1963, wood, nails.

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Gunther Uecker.

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Gunther Uecker. By 1958, after spending time with the French artist Yves Klein in the summer of 1957, Uecker had fused his interest in line and the tactility of paint with an exploration of the monochrome. Uecker’s monochromes combined thickly applied oil paint with vertical or horizontal striations traced in the surface.

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Gunther Uecker. A detail of Laos-Zum Schweigen der Schrift, 1974, paint on canvas.

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Enrico Castellani.  Enrico Castellani exposes about twenty works among the most revealing and important of his career up to some most recent works. 

Above: Il Muro del Tempo, 1968, seven metronomes on wooden base.

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Enrico Castellani.  Light and shade, space and structure should be contained in the work itself and not be elicited in viewers by means of sensory deception. In 1959 Castellani showed his “Superficie Nera” his first relief paintings. To make them, he worked over his canvases with a nail gun to produce a relief surface that induced light and shade effects through alternating depressions and raised areas. Castellani left the canvases monochrome, usually white.
Above: Superficie Nera, 1959, acrylic on canvas.

  

Enrico Castellani

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Enrico Castellani.  In 1964 Enrico Castellani’s works were shown at the Venice Biennale in a separate room. In 1968 he took part in “Documenta 4” and he was also among the leaders of protests at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale. With Enzo Mari, Castellani co-wrote ‘Un rifiuto possibile’ (‘a possible refusal ‘, published in 1969 in Almanacco Letterario Bompiani, Milan), an opinion piece in which the authors advocate vigorously for the autonomy of art and artists from commercial interests. 
Above: The red painting, Superficie Rossa, 1962, acrylic on shaped canvas, and below Doppio Angolare, 2011/12 chrome on canvas.

 

Enrico Castellani/Gunther Uecker exhibition – Enrico Castellani.  …Following a period of forced exile in Switzerland, in 1973 Castellani returned to Italy and settled in Celleno, near Viterbo. Since then, Castellani has continued to play by his own rules. Day after day, he gives life to new relief paintings that make room for ‘infinite encounters, agonizing waits, tautological commensurations, existential suffering and utopian substantiations’, as he remains firmly anchored in the validity and timeliness of his inventive spirit.

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