Guglielmo Castelli: Improving Songs for Anxious Children

The Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, supported by Mendes Wood DM and Rodeo,  presents “Improving Songs for Anxious Children,” an exhibition by Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli.

Castelli’s diverse site-specific works, conceived for Palazzetto Tito in Venice, include paintings, maquettes, textiles, and kinetic sculptures, exploring the delicate boundary between fragility and violence.

Drawing inspiration from a children’s book, Castelli reflects on the universal experiences of first times, attempts, and the inexorable failures of childhood.

Castelli envisions the interior life of a hypothetical child left at home through recurring motifs and incorporates delicate materials creating a visual language with Kafkaesque neurosis and a theatrical metaphysicality reminiscent of de Chirico.

The curator Milovan Farronato describes Castelli’s critically acclaimed work as featuring liquid and osmotic painting, with hypnotic abstractions and distorted perspectives interacting with escaping shadows.