Arduino Cantafora

ARDUINO CANTAFORA was born in Milan in 1945.

From a very young age he nurtured a curiosity for organic forms, anatomy and entomology, passions that remained alive throughout his architectural studies. He discovered very early the language of drawing, which became his privileged tool for capturing forms. Cantafora begun his career as a painter by tackling the thorny technical challenge of oil painting, becoming a copyist of Caravaggio. From that moment, the craftmanship and artisanal pleasure of painting would never abandon him.

While studying architecture at Politecnico di Milan, he perfected the pictorial representation of the architecture of historical cities. His interpretations revolve around shadow and light, in a faithfully Caravaggesque inspiration. The skills he matured in these years will be invaluable during his collaboration with architect Aldo Rossi (1973-1978), but they will also influence his future work, dominated by the translation of architecture into painting. In 1973, Cantafora exhibited La Città analoga at the Milan Triennale, a large-scale painting now owned by Museo del Novecento in Milan. This painting became the manifesto of La Tendenza, an architectural movement that reintegrates elements of 20th-century European Rationalism by emphasizing the history of places as central to projects. In 2012, La Tendenza was the subject of a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Cantafora participated again in the Milan Triennale in 1981 and 1988. He also took part in the Biennale di Architettura in Venice in 1978 and 1980, and in the Biennale d’Arte in 1984. Between 1985 and 1986, he was in Berlin at the invitiation of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). The city inspired him to create a series of paintings that were exhibited at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum in Berlin. Two large canvases, Das Andere Berlin, 1984 have been acquired in 2006 by the National Museum of Modern Art (MNAM) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. These two paintings are part of the 89 works by Cantafora in the collection of the museum. During the 1990s, Cantafora conceived several set designs for La Scala in Milan and for other prestigious venues such as the Aix-en-Provence Festival. His work as a set designer earned him the second place of the Ubu Prize, Italy’s most important theatre award. Between 2022 and 2023, he was invited to two major public exhibitions: Architectures impossibles at the Musée des Beaux-arts in Nancy and Un tiempo proprio at the centre Pompidou in Malaga, where two large Berlin canvases from the Centre Pompidou’s collection in Paris were exhibited.

Arduino Cantafora was professor of Architecture at the IUAV University of Venice from 1982 to 1986, at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio (AAM) from 1998 to 2011, and “visiting professor” at Yale University in 1988. In 1989 he was appointed full professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he was chairman of the Department of Visual Representation. He is honorary professor at EPFL since 2011. He is the author of several publications on architecture and education, as well as an autobiographical novel and short stories published by Einaudi. Since 2016 he collaborates with Antonio Colombo’s gallery in Milan, where he exhibited in the show Case Cose Città with Alessandro Mendini, and in 2021 he was part of the group show In the Garden of Eden. A landscape of things with Alessandro Mendini and friends.