Fondazione Antonio e Carmela Calderara

The Antonio Calderara Collection came into being thanks to the acquisitions and exchanges that the Maestro made with his contemporary artists, linked to him by relationships of esteem and friendship or affinity of research. Thus he composed over time what he simply and modestly entitled The Story of Antonio Calderara and a selection of his contemporary artist friends, consisting of 327 works of painting and sculpture - 56 of which were by his own hand and 271 by various European, American, Japanese and Chinese artists.
Calderara, an artist disbanded from group and movement affiliations, in his artistic maturity places himself within a current that includes some masters from the origins of abstractionism such as Michail Larinov or Friedrich Voderdemberge-Gildewart or Sonia Delaunay, his contemporaries such as Lucio Fontana or Victor Vasarely and young people such as Piero Manzoni or Yves Klein.
It was the Maestro himself, aware of the enormous value of his collection, who opened the doors of his home-studio inside a beautiful 17th-century palazzo in Vacciago di Ameno, a small village on the eastern shore of Lake Orta, to everyone, so that later generations could also be helped to better understand the great mystery that is art and its function.