Antonio Calderara was an Italian artist who spent most of his career north of Milan, working in a seventeenth-century villa. Calderara was primarily self-taught, leaving his studies in engineering to focus on painting in 1925.1 He made this work after meeting Lucio Fontana and his circle, including Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, in the early 1960s. For this painting and others, Calderara built his own frames.
Donald Judd encountered Calderara’s work for the first time at a 1984 exhibition at Annemarie Verna Galerie, in Zürich.2 The Italian artist’s home and studio are preserved by the Fondazione Antonio e Carmela Calderara, near Lake Orta in Vacciago, Italy.