Luciano Castelli
Born in 1951 in Lucerne, Switzerland
Lives and works in Zurich
Luciano Castelli studied at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
 
Luciano Castelli is a painter, photographer, performer, sculptor and film director. He rose to prominence in 1972 when he was invited to participate in Documenta 5 in Kassel. His work revolves around self-portraiture and is critical of bourgeois society and its norms. Associated with the body art movement, he cross-dresses, stages himself, takes photographs with Pierre Molinier and participates in Jean-Christophe Ammann's cult exhibition, ‘Transformer-Aspekte der Travestie' in 1974. The photographs gave rise to painted portraits and sculptures. In Berlin, from 1978 to 1989, he was one of the leading representatives of the Neue Wilden (New Wild Ones) group. His performances gave rise to hyper-coloured, often monumental paintings, for which he applied paint with broad brushstrokes. He composed portraits, self-portraits and nudes, landscapes, intervened in situ in exhibition spaces with large murals, and produced series of sculptures and photographs. He made the films Room Full of Mirrors (1982) and Venice (1984). He exhibits internationally. The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him in 1996, and he participated in the FHEL's Libres Figurations exhibition in 2018 and 2021. 

Luciano Castelli said, ‘I realised it was easier to work on my own because there were no barriers.'