Luciano Castelli Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Luciano Castelli was born in Switzerland in 1934 and studied at the School of Applied Arts with Max von Moos. In the 1970s he became the key figure of Lucerne Bohemia, a residential community that became part of art history thanks to Franz Gertsch's snapshots transformed into monumental photorealistic paintings. Read the full biography

Luciano Castelli was born in Switzerland in 1934 and studied at the School of Applied Arts with Max von Moos. In the 1970s he became the key figure of Lucerne Bohemia, a residential community that became part of art history thanks to Franz Gertsch's snapshots transformed into monumental photorealistic paintings. Castelli became famous above all for "Medici", a group portrait of the "long-haired monsters around the acute painter Luciano Castelli", which became the "cover photo of Harald Szeemann's document 5". In 1971, Castelli exhibited "Shiloum", a smoking pipe used for hashish. In 1974, Jean-Christophe Ammann exhibited androgynous photos of Castelli in his exhibition "Transformer - Aspects of Travesty". In 1978, Castelli went to Berlin and joined the circle of the Galerie am Moritzplatz, becoming a Neue Wilde. In 1989, he settled in Paris and began experimenting with a home-made darkroom and his Revolving Paintings. Castelli is currently receiving increasing interest in his work and his photographic self-portraits have been published in a book by the art publisher Edition Patrick Frey and shown in a major panoramic exhibition in Paris. In 2015, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing presents a major exhibition of his paintings.