Luciano Castelli
Trained in Lucerne, he attended a preparatory course at the School of Applied Arts, where he studied, among others, with Max von Moos.
In 1978, he moved to Berlin and became part of the circle around Galerie am Moritzplatz, participating in the Neue Wilde movement, of which he is described as one of the principal representatives between 1978 and 1989. At the same time, he co-founded the punk group Geile Tiere with Salomé, singing and playing bass. Following his move to Paris in 1989, the Maison européenne de la Photographie devoted a retrospective to him in 1996.
On a formal level, he developed the «Revolving Paintings», canvases conceived to rotate 360° without a defined upper edge, a process documented in the publication Revolving Paintings (Benteli, 1998) and adapted into graphic editions (e.g. Revolving Litho). His photographic work, often staged and centred on performed self-portraiture, includes sessions with Pierre Molinier and is the subject of the volume Self-Portrait 1973–1986 (Patrick Frey, 2014).
Among his commissions and presentations are the portrait of Stephan Eicher for the cover of the LP I Tell This Night (1985) and a major exhibition presented in 2015 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, followed by a presentation at the Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai. In addition to painting and photography, his practice also encompasses sculpture, filmmaking and performance. According to the sources consulted, his work has experienced a renewed contemporary interest in recent years.
