/ Victor Kastelic

Victor Kastelic (1964) is a well-established American-Italian artist with Slovene roots who lives and works in Turin. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. After finishing his studies at the College of Fine Arts of the University of Utah, he permanently relocated to Turin in 1987. Over the last 30 years, he has participated in numerous exhibitions in Turin (Galleria Carbone and Galleria In Arco) and throughout Italy (Arte 3, Ruggerini & Zonca, Milan) and in Europe (Artiscope, Brussels, and Zeno X, Amsterdam). His works belong to the permanent collections of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Museo Nazionale Risorgimento Italiano in Turin, and the Fundazione Borroni in Milan. In 2017 he opened Kspaces, an independent art space for experimental exhibitions, concerts and events. He is currently involved in designing the Art and Art History curriculum for graduate students at the New York State University at Syracuse, USA, and at the Università degli Studi in Siena, Italy, and teaches art and art history at the Lycée Français in Turin, Italy.

In his artistic practice, Kastelic uses a whirlpool of diverse and expressive visual languages, ranging across painting, sculpture, drawing, illustration and printmaking, and crosses boundaries between them in vivid mixed media collages. He has been involved in numerous public art projects, some of which were made for site-specific locations. In 2008 he presented the monumental public art project Industrial Garden, commissioned by the City of Turin and the Siemens Foundation, which can be seen in Corso Romania, Turin. In 2010 the Library of Congress (Washington DC, USA) exhibited Unexpected Garden, a National Endowment For The Arts commission, which has since been exhibited throughout numerous American public libraries. In 2021 the state ASLn4 hospital of Ivrea, Italy, inaugurated in its obstetrics and gynaecology ward the permanent installation Symbiosis, including re-designed spaces, a colour scheme and furniture along with ten large-scale, luminous, interactive paintings.

Between 2000 and 2002, Kastelic produced more than 500 drawings as part of his Cloudburst project. The project was presented as a one-man travelling exhibition embracing all his ancestral and cultural roots in the USA (The Salt Lake Art Center, Utah, 2002), Italy (Palazzo Bricherasio Museum, Turin, 2004), and the UK (The Talbot Rice Museum, Edinburgh, 2005), with each exhibiting over 300 artworks. It thus seemed obvious that if his art was to be shown in Slovenia for the first time, it should be this project, thus symbolically concluding the full circle of his roots. The selection, made by Andreja Brulc, of 20 drawings, shown at Galerija Veronika in Kamnik and accompanied by a catalogue, is particularly focused on his family in the USA, his upbringing in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, and on the Wild West as either represented in the media (Spaghetti Western) or personally experienced through his family trips. If his great-grandparents from Slovenia had moved to the United States around 1900 in pursuit of the American Dream during the Great Migration from Central Europe, it seemed appropriate to complete the selection with the final touch symbolising his cultural emigration to Italy: the view of Settimo, a municipality of Turin, in the 1980s.

I have exposed myself to a story of images that have always influenced me in a number of ways but have been generally overlooked in my artwork. This project is about the process of sorting them out. – Cited from Ric Collier. “Memory to Myths”. In Victor Kastelic: Cloudburst (Grande Cache: Artpress, 2004). © Victor Kastelic

Settimo Torinese is the next town after my neighbourhood… when I got here in the 1980s, it was dismal and industrial. "Windows" refers to the scene of these urban landscapes seen through my car window… hence the shape [of the composition]… a place you didn’t want to get out and walk around. Now, post-industry, Settimo has become quite nice and friendly. The highway scenes were familiar to me as they resembled nowhere land in the USA". But the view is universal. – Victor Kastelic on "Window on Settimo N°1"/Kspaces Archive, Turin (2022)