Vincenzo Castella

Vincenzo Castella was born in Naples in 1952 and lives in Milan. He begins his career as a photographer in 1975 and between 1975 and 1983 he produces Geografia privata, a series of color photographs depicting domestic interiors. This work was selected for the exhibition European Iceberg, Ontario Museum, Toronto 1985.

Music inspires his travels to the United States in 1976, 1978 and 1980 and the project Hammie Nixon’s People was born, a semi-imaginary biography of bluesmen met during his research among communities of Afro-American people in Mississippi and Tennessee. This work has been realized with photos and 16mm film.

From 1998 Castella’s photographies start to be increasingly a-narrative. Focusing on the themes of distance and dislocation, the artist works on the production of images depicted from above which outline unusual profiles of European cities. The artist produces large color prints from large format film. The images develop actual hypotheses of visual crossover on the complexity of the tangle and histories of the cities. Among them, Naples, Milan, Turin, Rouen, Caen, Le Havre, Helsinki and Berlin as well as more distant realities including Ramallah and Jerusalem.
From 2006 Castella starts to create installations out of large-format photographic negatives, as in Cronache da Milano, presented at Art Unlimited in Basel in 2009, where the movements of a virtual camera render an articulated reading of the photo itself and the relations in the life of the city, what is visible and what is not.

Works by Vincenzo Castella have been presented in Europe and United States since 1980. In 2015 The Board of Trustees of the Tate Modern decided to include in the collection of the museum five works of Castella’s Malta Project.

His work is tied to the systematic reduction of the repertoire and to the synthesis of the language, away from any form of style evolution.