Lucio Fontana was a painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He was born in 1899 in Santa Fe Province, Argentina, to Italian parents. Fontana’s father worked as a sculptor, and Lucio eventually began to work in his studio, too. In 1927, Lucio Fontana moved back to Italy to study at Brera Academy, where he also had his first exhibition in 1930. In the 1930s, he split his time between Italy and France, where he made Expressionist and Modernist sculptures in ceramics, plaster, cement and bronze. As an artist, he enjoyed experimenting, and in the 1940s, he sought new forms of expression, such as free-hanging constructions. The works that perhaps best characterize him today are his spatial compositions, in which he explores room and space. In his Concetto Spatiale series, he gives an entirely monochromatic surface one or more razor-sharp cuts, which allows for contact with external and internal space. The positive and negative neutralize one another in that space, annihilating matter, while the gravitational holes are so fast that no light can get in.
Items related to Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) Argentina
Known as the ‘Zorro’ of the canvas, Lucio Fontana went on to change the course of art history forever. His method? A simple, but by no means trivial, slash of his painted canvases. This emblematic and powerful gesture cemented him as the founder of Spatialism, a movement still highly regarded today.
Printmaking has been popular for a long time, but interest has increased in recent years because it makes art accessible to all without sacrificing quality.
A document of great art historical importance, a manuscript handwritten by Austrian painter Egon Schiele, will be up for auction alongside other items in Vienna later this month.
