Antonio Calderara, Storia del Lago d'Orta (History of Lake Orta), 2011 Exhibition Poster

A large museum exhibition poster published by Ritter Musuem in Germany. Featuring an image of Calderara's 1976 painting ""Storia del Lago d'Orta (History of Lake Orta)"".

The exhibition presented some 50 works that provided an excellent overview of the great Italian artist’s oeuvre. The main focus was on Calderara’s abstracts from the late 1950s onward.

Prior to arriving once and for all at his own artistic style, the self-taught artist experimented for many years with a variety of styles, painting landscapes with an impressionistic air, still lifes in the manner of Morandi, as well as portraits and melancholy figure paintings.

During the 1950s he simplified his composition, making his paintings more frontal and planar. His favourite motif was often the hazy landscape of Lake Orta in upper Italy when the sun dipped it in pastel hues, for this was where he lived for many decades. In his Lake Orta works, he achieved an ever-increasing degree of abstraction. Landscape and architecture soon became completely stylised and resolved into geometrical shapes.

From then on, Antonio Calderara’s painting turned to a planar non-objectivism centred on color and light. In these works the surface dissolves into subtly nuanced fields of color; the picture space became purely a space of light that seems literally to glow from within.