Antonio Calderara: A Certain Light

18 Sep-22 Dec 2024

Overview

Antonio Calderara (1903-1978) is renowned for his delicate and exquisitely balanced abstract imagery which, in its restraint and subtlety, exhibits affinities with the work of Giorgio Morandi. Organised in collaboration with Lisson Gallery and the Fondazione Antonio e Carmela Calderara, it comprises some 50 works spanning the artist’s career and is the first museum exhibition to be dedicated to his paintings in the UK.

Calderara lived and worked around Lake Orta in the north of Italy – a landscape that offered him constant inspiration and was inextricably linked with the character and development of his art. Beginning his career during the 1920s, he moved from an expressive figurative style to the heightened or ‘magic’ form of realism explored by many artists in Italy during the inter-war years. In their precision and fascination with atmospheric effects, his paintings of the 1930s already hinted at the subsequent direction his art would take.

Over time, Calderara began to eliminate the human figure from his compositions, focusing his attention exclusively on the landscape around the lakeside town of Vacciago. By the late 1950s, he had distilled its elements to essential, geometric forms, creating images pervaded by silence and suffused with light, which teetered on the brink of abstraction.

His ostensibly simple evocations of time and place were infused with an intensely intimate quality and captured extraordinary tonal nuances. In 1959 – at the age of 56 – he made the transition to total abstraction. His works explored the same harmonious formal relationships as before, now without obvious references to the objective world, although certain mirrored shapes continued to evoke reflections on the surface of his beloved Lake Orta.

With these later paintings, Calderara proved himself to be an artist whose imagery was attuned to contemporary developments in the field of Concrete Art in Europe and the United States, having points of contact with the work of figures such as Josef Albers, Max Bill, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman.