Antonio Calderara: The Double at The Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is staging the first ever solo exhibition in a New York gallery of post-war Italian Modernist painter Antonio Calderara (1903 – 1978). This introductory presentation spans the painter’s transition away from the official style of 1940s figuration towards his own unique mode of lyrical abstraction in the 1950s and ’60s, partly influenced by the Metaphysical movement of Giorgio de Chirico and then informed by other artists based in Milan such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni. The show centres on Calderara’s predilection for ‘doubling’ or mirroring forms in his work, as seen in an early self-portrait, a canvas featuring twin girls with matching ponytails or in many of his later, vertically split geometric compositions.