Italian artist Antonio Calderara is recognised for his figurative and abstract paintings that often relate to the culture and landscape of his native country. Characterised by their soft palettes and sharply measured compositions, Calderara's paintings may be compared to those of abstract artists such as Josef Albers or Piet Mondrian.
Read MoreFollowing his death in 1978, the Antonio and Carmela Calderara Foundation was established to preserve the artist's former home, studio, and personal artwork collection.
Antonio Calderara was born in 1903 in Abbiategrasso. Growing up in Milan, Calderara was self-taught and drew influences from a diverse range of genres including Post-impressionism, Renaissance art, and the Il Novecento Italiano group.
In 1925, Calderara abandoned his engineering studies at the Polytechnic University of Milan to pursue a career in the arts. His early work was predominantly figurative, and experimented with colour and form. Calderara began to make still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, often drawing inspiration from Milanese canals and local churches.
Calderara frequently drew from Italian culture as stimulus for his paintings, capturing the people, objects, and atmosphere of his local environment. Representation of light became an important concern of Calderara's work, particularly following his move to Lake Orta in Vacciago in 1934. Fascinated with the way light fell on the lake, the artist developed delicate painting techniques to portray reflections on the water.
Paesaggio invernale (1936) is an early painting by Calderara, executed in oils on a small-scale panel. Depicting a typical Italian neighbourhood buried in snow, Paesaggio invernale demonstrates the artist's gradual shift away from figurative and representational imagery, to more simplified compositions. The muted colour palette and flattened geometric forms further reveal Calderara's interest in abstraction, as well as his developing minimalistic style.
Quadrati e Rettangoli (1959) was Calderara's first fully abstract painting, featuring a grid of pastel-coloured squares and executed in oils on wood.
For Quadrati e Rettangoli, Calderara used the velatura technique that was popular during the Italian Renaissance, and was often used in early Flemish portraiture. The technique involves the application of multiple layers of coloured and white pigments to create a translucent varnish, resulting in a softer form of abstraction that allowed Calderara to capture the essence of light and space through geometric forms.
Through the 1930s until his death, Calderara created a series of paintings depicting Lake Orta in Vacciago. The paintings vary in style, typically becoming more abstract and minimal over time. Calderara became interested in capturing the composition of light and movement in the everyday, using reduced colour schemes and minimal forms of blocks, squares, and planes.
After Calderara's death in 1978, Giuseppe Alemani founded the Antonio and Carmela Calderara Foundation. The foundation opened to the public in 1979, and displays a range of Calderara's paintings alongside hundreds of works by abstract artists from all over the world, including peers and contemporaries of Calderara.
Calderara's work is included in the collections of museums and galleries including Collezione Ramo, Milan; Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, Rome; Judd Foundation, Texas; Musée de Cambrai, Cambrai; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Munich.
Antonio Calderara has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Antonio Calderara, Lisson Gallery, London (2022); Acquarelli / Aquarelle / Watercolors, Galerie Annemarie Verna, Zurich (2020); The Double, Lisson Gallery, New York (2019); Painting Infinity, Lisson Gallery, London (2018); Light-Spaces: Paintings from Fifty Years, Ernst Barlach Haus, Hamburg (2018); Kunst Museum Winterthur, Winthertur (2017).
Group exhibitions include Portals, Lisson Gallery, London (2022); Italy at Frieze, Embassy of Italy, London (2021); Hungary vs. The World, QG Gallery, Brussels (2020); GIGANTISME, FRAC Grand Large – Hauts-de-France, Dunkirk (2019); Signals: If You Like I Shall Grow, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2018).
The Fondazione Calderara website can be found here, and their Instagram can be found here.
Ocula | 2022
![Progetto 19 [Project 19] by Antonio Calderara contemporary artwork works on paper, drawing](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/38/38e6525f-49be-47d6-805a-353d29208372_600_382.jpg)
