Artist Profile
CASCELLA, Andrea
(1920 - 1990)
Cascella was born in Pescara, Italy, in 1920 into a family of artists. Indeed, he received his initial training in painting under his father Tommaso and grandfather Basilio. World War II forced him to abandon his art to take part in the battles in Piedmont. He subsequently moved to Rome, where, together with his brother Pietro, he devoted himself to ceramics and stone sculpture applied to architecture. In the late 1950s he moved to Milan and the years that followed saw him combine working on his own sculptures with teaching sculpture at various Italian institutions. He was a prize winner in the 1958 international competition for the Auschwitz Memorial and awarded the Principal Italian Sculpture Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale. He died in the summer of 1990 in Milan.
The Birth of Venus is indicative of Cascella’s style of sculpture and his use of big, often rounded polished blocks which are fitted into each other so as to form a kind of precise giant puzzle.
‘In his early works Cascella gave expression to some of those characteristics which
today are seen as specifically his; a deep love for the material, a refined, sensitive
appreciation of the grain, brightness and porosity of the stone – in other words what may be defined as the texture of the plastic material. Above all his work is typified by a construction based on the juxtaposition and dovetailing together of the individual elements to form a unitary whole which, as a result of this very subdivision freely used, acquires a quality of dynamic and light fluidity which a block of stone could not otherwise possess... In certain of Cascella’s works it is the mechanical element which dominates, while in other the organic, anatomical aspect is emphasised; and there are statues which contain evident anthropomorphic elements, with their clear sexual connotations as expressed for example in the symbolic embrace.”
Works Available
Untitled (pen)
Untitled (pencil)