Vincenzo Castella
Born in Naples, 1952
Vincenzo Castella was born in Naples in 1952 and lives in Milan. He began his work as a photographer in 1975 producing, between 1975 and 1983, Private Geography, a series of colour photographs of domestic interiors, a work selected for the exhibition European Iceberg, Ontario Museum, Toronto 1985.
From 1998 Castella’s photographs began to become strongly a-narrative. Focusing his research on the themes of distance and dislocation, the artist devotes himself to the production of images captured from above that outline unusual profiles of European cities. The artist produces large colour prints from large format film. The images develop current hypotheses of visual blending on the complexity of the city’s interweaving and histories. These include images of European cities such as Naples, Milan, Turin, Rouen, Caen, Le Havre, Helsinki and Berlin as well as more distant realities including Ramallah and Jerusalem.
Since 2006, Castella has been making installations from photographic negatives. This is the case of Cronache da Milano (Chronicles from Milan), a work presented at Art Unlimited in Basel in 2009, in which the movements of a virtual camera reproduce an articulated reading of the photo itself and the relationships in the life of the city with what is visible and not visible.
Vincenzo Castella’s works have been shown since 1980 in Europe and America. In 2015, the Board of Trustees of the Tate Modern included a selection of five works from his Malta Project in its collection.
Far from any form of evolution of style, Castella’s work is linked to the systematic reduction of repertoire and synthesis of language.
