ENRICO DELLA TORRE – GEOMETRIE ORGANICHE

THE EXHIBITION

Curated by Veronica Zanardi and Gabi Scardi
MUSEO BUTTI | CONTEMPORANEA
Viale Varese 4, Viggiù (VA)

Vernissage
Sunday, March 15, 11:00 a.m.

From March 15 to May 31, the Butti | Contemporanea Museum is dedicating an exhibition to Enrico Della Torre, one of the most lyrical and coherent painters of late 20th-century Italian art, whose research throughout his life explored the profound and structural relationship between landscape, perception, and inner experience.
Curated by Veronica Zanardi and Gabi Scardi, the exhibition retraces the evolution of the artist’s language, highlighting the foundational role of place—particularly the river landscape of the Adda and the Cremonese plain—as the poetic, emotional, and formal matrix of his work. In Della Torre’s art, nature is never a simple subject, but a living interlocutor: a complex organism of light, rhythm, color, and sign, from which structures, energies, and presences emerge that verge on abstraction without ever losing an intimate adherence to sensory experience.
The exhibition itinerary spans the different phases of his production: from his figurative beginnings to his progressive formal reductions; from the chromatic vibrations of the flat landscape to the biomorphic apparitions of the river microcosm; and finally to the geometric and unstable tensions of the last decades, in which lines, diagonals, grids, and ladders become metaphors for an equilibrium that is always precarious, at once existential and poetic. What emerges is a painting capable of combining rigor and lightness, method and intuition, lyrical vision and critical awareness.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the sixth volume of the series Quaderni del Butti is presented, entirely devoted to Enrico Della Torre, with critical essays by Gabi Scardi and Veronica Zanardi. The catalogue explores the meaning and continuity of a research practice that, while traversing different languages and solutions, remains consistently faithful to its generative principles: attention to the deep structures of the landscape, collaboration with nature, and the ability to “tell reality” not by describing it, but by evoking its hidden energy.
The exhibition and the catalogue offer the portrait of an artist fully present to the world, for whom painting was a cognitive experience, an ethical choice, and a form of participation: a way of inhabiting the visible without dominating it, allowing mystery to continue to vibrate.

Enrico Della Torre was born in Pizzighettone (Cremona) in 1931.
He studied in Milan, graduating in 1951 from the Liceo Artistico di Brera and four years later from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. His work was soon recognized through the awarding of several prizes.
In 1956 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan, presented by Guido Ballo, where he exhibited paintings and engravings.
In 1957 he traveled to Paris; in 1960 he received the Premio San Fedele in Milan, the city where he settled permanently. His travels to Germany and his marriage to Christa Bert in 1961 led to an intense dialogue with German culture.
His work attracted the interest of important collectors such as Emilio Jesi and Lamberto Vitali, and from the 1960s onward critics including Roberto Tassi, Marco Valsecchi, Franco Russoli, Elda Fezzi, Gianfranco Bruno, and Elena Pontiggia wrote about him.
In 1971, one of his paintings, exhibited in Basel at the Suzanne Egloff Gallery, was purchased by the American painter Mark Tobey.
He carried out a regular and extensive exhibition activity in solo and group shows in Italy and abroad.
In Milan, the Galleria del Milione supported his work from 1963 to 1986; with the Galleria delle Ore he established a professional relationship that lasted from 1968 to 1996; also in Milan, from 1990 he began collaborating with the Galleria Lorenzelli Arte.
His work was exhibited regularly at the Frankfurter Westend Galerie in Frankfurt and at the Galerie Dittmar in Hamburg/Berlin, and from the 1990s exhibitions in Switzerland became increasingly frequent.
In 1972 he exhibited a group of paintings at the 10th Quadriennale di Roma. In 1974 he took part in the exhibition La ricerca dell’identità, curated by G. Bruno, held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
Among the main solo exhibitions to be mentioned are the one held in 1976 at the Sala della Balla at the Museo del Castello Sforzesco in Milan, later traveling to public spaces in Mantua, Varese and Cremona; in 1987 the retrospective featuring 120 works at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, curated by Erich Steingraeber, later transferred to other German cities; and in 1989 at the PAC in Milan, curated by
Luisa Somaini; in 2000, a retrospective was held at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia, curated by Sandro Parmiggiani; in 2001 at Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona, Switzerland, curated by Matteo Bianchi and Maria Will.
In the field of graphic art, it is worth noting his collaborations with the art publishers Giorgio Upiglio and Vanni Scheiwiller of Milan and with Franco Masoero of Turin. Della Torre accompanied, with engravings and drawings, poetic texts by J. Donne, M. Praz, V. Sereni, L. Vitali, Novalis, G. Ballo, G. Pascoli, C. Sbarbaro, G. Raboni, S. Heaney, L. Erba, R. Sanesi, Lucrezio, M. Varga, and S. Sanna.
He has participated in important group or generational exhibitions, in surveys of contemporary painting, and in significant historical exhibitions.
In 1999, he was appointed National Academician of San Luca Academy.
In 2011, he was invited to the 54th Venice Biennale.
In 2012, the volume “Enrico Della Torre – Catalogo generale dell’opera grafica 1952–2012” was published by Skira, curated by S. Parmiggiani.
Also published by Skira, in 2022 “Enrico Della Torre – Catalogo ragionato dell’opera pittorica 1953–2020” was released, curated by Francesco Tedeschi with a critical anthology by Luca P. Nicoletti.
Since 1978, he had a studio in Teglio in Valtellina, where he worked intensively for long periods each year and where he passed away in July 2022.
His works are held in numerous public and private collections in Italy and abroad, and in several Italian and international museums.