Niclas castello la diabolica commedia: prelude

CONTEMPORARY COMMEDIA:
CASTELLO REVISITS DANTE’S DIVINE COMMEDY
From May 6 to November 22 German conceptual artist Niclas Castello presents La diabolica commedia: Prelude, a new body of work continuing his exploration of one of the most important works of world literature, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Developed since 2022, the project comprises more than 220 drawings that translate the 14th-century epic into a contemporary visual language.
Niclas Castello, who has been fascinated by Dante's story ever since, is now exploring Dante's journey through hell, purgatory and paradise in a very personal way at the height of his life and creative career. Castello now wants to continue Dante's work and expand the Divine Comedy to include the course of history, so that it reaches up to the year 2026. Like Dante, Castello assigned personalities and events of the past centuries to the corresponding circles of hell. The new work is entitled “La diabolica commedia” - the Devil's Comedy.
The result is a highly personal interpretation of this canonical work, reflecting on the relationship between individual experience and collective history. Conceived as an intersection of literature, history and visual art, the project forms an ongoing exploration of how classical narratives can be reinterpreted through a contemporary lens. The drawings titled “La diabolica commedia” will be presented to the public for the first time ever during the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Through this project, Castello expresses his deep connection to Italian culture, as well as his admiration and appreciation for one of the most important works of European literature by one of the most significant poets of the Middle Ages. The project will continue to evolve in Italy, where Castello plans to further develop the series in dialogue with Dante’s legacy. A large-scale installation is envisioned as an immersive spatial environment, assembling the works into a cohesive architectural structure.

Niclas Castello (born 1978 in Neuhaus am Rennweg, Germany) is a contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He attracted worldwide attention in 2022 with his sensational work “The Castello Cube”, a 410-pound cube made of 24-carat gold on whose surface the traces of the world can be seen. Castello's life was influenced early on by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which drew his attention to the impressive world of Pop Art and the Neo-Expressionism of Jean-Michel Basquiat. These influences are reflected in his paintings and sculptures. Castello's artistic work is characterized by the tension between his preoccupation with sculpture and expression through painting. This long-standing conflict enabled Castello to create his groundbreaking and highly acclaimed Cube Painting-Sculpture in 2016. Art historians have recognized this as the symbiosis of these art genres and thus as a response to the paragone dispute that has existed since antiquity. With the Cube Paintings, Castello overcomes the ubiquitous separation of sculpture and painting and transforms large-format oil paintings into three- dimensional objects. Using the visual language of popular culture, he explores the world of consumers and their relationship to art and society, following the perspectives of Andy Warhol. He was involved in the street art movement in Germany in the late 1990s, then moved to Paris in 2004 and later to New York City, where he developed his current incomparable style. Castello currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Germany.