Antonio Calderara

Antonio Calderara was born on 28 October 1903 in Abbiategrasso near Milan. At the age of 20, at his father's request, he began studying engineering in Milan, but soon abandoned his studies in favour of painting. Calderara was self-taught as a painter and in 1934 he had his first exhibition in the Galleria Bolaffi in Milan, where classically composed views of the city can be seen. His early painterly vocabulary included the exploration of the representation of light and the color relationship between surfaces. The town of Vacciago in the Piedmont region of Italy, where he lives with his wife and daughter and which will form the centre of his life from 1934, is equally influential for his painterly work; this can be felt in the small vedutas he created in the 1950s as well as in his abstract works. The death of his wife in 1944 and Calderara's first heart attack six years later are formative events in his life and work. In 1954 he first met works by Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich and Josef Albers. During this time, more and more small-format works with representations of the artist, his family and individual objects were created. Light remains a dominant visual medium. From the 1960s Calderara devoted itself to non-objectivity: starting with the principle of the golden section, ratios of numbers and proportions were of great importance for Calderara. Calderara differs from the representatives of Constructivism or Concrete Art in that, despite his systematic approach, he does not follow strictly radical pictorial concepts or colour systems, but rather acts intuitively in his approach. In 1960 he exhibited for the first time north of the Alps in the studio f in Ulm and from 1961 exhibitions took place regularly in Switzerland, namely in the Charles Lienhard Gallery in Zurich, in the Toni Gerber Gallery in Bern and finally from 1969 in the Annemarie Verna Gallery in Zurich. In the same year, at the invitation of art historian and curator Jean-Christophe Ammann, the first Swiss museum exhibition takes place at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Calderara takes part in the 4th documenta in Kassel in 1968. In 1971 Calderara's works were exhibited in the gallery at the Taxispalais in Innsbruck.

Antonio Calderara died at Lago d'Orta in 1978 at the age of 75.

The Ernst-Barlach-Haus in Hamburg presented from February to June 2018 in the exhibition Antonio Calderara Lichtträume. Malerei aus fünfzig Jahren of selected works by the artist, which he realized between 1927 and 1977.