Lucio Fontana. Photo from the collection of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
Via Brera, 28, 20121 Milano MI, Italy
Brera Academy where Lucio Fontana studied under Adolf Wildt from 1928 to 1930.
Career
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1954
Lucio Fontana at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1955
Lucio Fontana surrounded by his works in the garden of his Milanese study in Corso Monforte. Photo by Giorgio Lotti/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1955
Lucio Fontana with his Concetto spaziale at his atelier in Corso Monforte, Milan. Photo by Giorgio Lotti/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Poretfolio.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1955
Lucio Fontana punches holes on a canvas hanging on the trunk of a tree, in the garden of his study in Corso Monforte. Photo by Giorgio Lotti/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1955
Lucio Fontana with one of his works in his studio in Corso Monforte. Photo by Giorgio Lotti/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1958
Lucio Fontana with Eduardo Chillida. Photo by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1960
Lucio Fontana with his patron Olga Deterding. Photo by Mondadori.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
1966
Lucio Fontana at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana in front of a painting at the Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, in the 1950s. Photo by Mondadori Portfolio.
Gallery of Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana at the Venice Biennale. Photo by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche.
Lucio Fontana punches holes on a canvas hanging on the trunk of a tree, in the garden of his study in Corso Monforte. Photo by Giorgio Lotti/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori.
Lucio Fontana was an Argentine-born Italian artist famous for his work in such media as painting and sculpture. An art theorist keen on the relationship between surface and dimensionality, he is best known as the father of Spatialism.
Background
Ethnicity:
Fontana's father emigrated to Argentina from Italy, and the artist's mother was both of Swiss and Italian descent.
Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario, Argentina, on February 19, 1899. He was a son of Luigi Fontana, an Italian sculptor of commemorative and funerary monuments, and Lucia Bottini, an Argentinian actress. His parents never married and finally broke up in 1905.
Education
Lucio Fontana was brought up in Argentina till 1905 when he relocated to Italy for schooling. He settled in Varese with his relatives and studied architecture, physics, engineering, math, and the arts. It was at that time that he became interested in the ideas of Futurism.
World War I made Fontana drop his studies for a while but he continued his education after the conflict and graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera or Brera Academy with a diploma of a master builder. He came to the institution one more time in 1928 to learn several techniques of using gilded plaster and plasticity under the well-known sculptor Adolf Wildt for two years. Fontana was extremely good in carving during his studies.
The start of Lucio Fantana's career can be counted from his military service during World War I. Fontana joined the infantry regiment of the Italian army in 1916 and was discharged two years later, after an arm injury, in the rank of second lieutenant. After the war, in the early 1920s, Fontana came back to Argentina where he began to assist his father sculptor at his firm Fontana y Scarbelli which produced gravestones. In 1924, Lucio Fontana took up his own sculpture workshop and soon started to exhibit his works. A year later, he participated in the Argentinian VIII Salon de Bellas Artes, and in 1926 was among the first exhibitors of Nexus group of artists.
The succession of the subsequent exhibitions contributed to the artistic development of Fontana pushing him to go beyond the commercial standards in sculpture. The Galeria del Milione in Milan, in a group show of which he participated in 1930, hosted his debut solo exhibition the next year. The artist presented to the public the most innovative results of his experiments with shapes and materials, including a life-sized sculpture Homo nero (now lost). Still barely successful sculptor at the time, Lucuio Fontana took part in several state competitions to earn extra money.
The level of abstraction in Fontana's works increased with the course of time, and by the end of the decade, he was regarded as an "abstract ceramicist" due to his polychromatic ceramic work, including figurines of land and marine animals, that sold well in the small coastal town of Albisola, Liguria, where he worked alongside his Futurist colleagues. In 1937, Fontana traveled to France where he discovered porcelain techniques at the famous Sèvres factory. While there, he got acquainted with Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, and Joan Miro.
Fleeing from the outbreaking Second World War, the artist left Italy and went to Argentina in 1940. Four years later, his Mujer herida (Injured Woman) sculptural composition brought him success at the XXXIV Salon Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Fontana tried himself as an educator during the war years. While teaching art at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano, he contributed to the foundation of the experimental Altamira cultural center and, supported by his students, initiated the "Manifesto Blanco" (White Manifesto), which called for the "completed reformation of society through science and art."
Upon his return to Italy in 1947, Lucio Fontana found his studio completely destroyed by the Allied bombing of the country. It was probably both oppressively and inspiring at once because the artist, filled with a plethora of innovative ideas on art in relation with the science, had a real space where to realize all his ambitious plans on redefining the traditional perception of painting, sculpture, and architecture. So, plunged himself in the renovation of the city, Fontana collaborated with many artists and architects not only as the visual artist but as an art theorist who encouraged his colleagues to participate in heated debates with art authorities, including the critic Giampiero Giani and the art dealer Carlo Cardazzo.
It was right at that time that Spatialism was born through the publication of the Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo (First Spatialist Manifesto) in 1947 and its second part, Secondo Manifesto Spaziale, (Second Spatialist Manifesto). Both documents were calling artists to leave behind the conventional approach to the art materials and to turn their attention to the modern scientific technologies.
Fontana tirelessly developed newly born art movement throughout the 1960s until his death. His Spatialist projects as well as the works he produced basing on them, including sphere-like sculptures, paintings with holes or with accumulations of paint and clay, provided him with a great international attention and recognition.
Although Lucio Fontana worked on many comissions from the Fascist regime under Benito Mussolini, including a bust (now-lost) of Benito Mussolini himself, he didn't support their ideology and was far from politics indeed.
However, in 1939, the artist joined the Corrente, the anti-Fascist group of expressionist artists in Milan.
Views
Quotations:
"I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture."
"Matter, color, and sound are the phenomena whose simultaneous development is an integral part of the new art."
"A butterfly in flight stimulates my imagination. By freeing myself from discourse, I lose myself in time and I start making holes."
"We are living in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and standing plaster figures no longer have any reason to exist. What is needed is a change in both essence and form. What is needed is the supercession of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It is necessary to have an art that is in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit."
"An earth-bound form occupies a place, if I empty this form I create a space, a form above the earth occupies a place, if I put a hole in it I create a void, I don't conquer space... A form (and in saying a form it is understood that I mean a sculpture or a painting) occupies a space... but this is not a means for the conquest of space... No form can be spatial."
"Art is going to be a completely different thing... Not an object, nor a form... Art is going to become infinite, immensity, immaterial, philosophy... Enough with the bourgeois function of art. Open the doors."
Membership
Lucio Fontana became a member of the Parisian association Abstraction-Création in 1935.
Corrente Artists' Group
,
Italy
1939
Abstraction-Création
,
France
1935
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Albert Einstein
Artists
Yves Klein, Arturo Martini
Connections
Lucio Fontana married Teresita Rasini in 1952, about two decades after their first meeting.
Lucio Fontana: Catalogue Raisonné
The catalogue raisonné of the work of the Italian painter and sculptor presents a historical profile of the artist's complete body of work.
2006
Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali
This unparalleled exhibition catalogue of Lucio Fontana's architectural work presents a substantial number of the spatial environments conceived by the artist between 1948 and 1968.
Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials
This richly illustrated book, the third in the Getty Conservation Institute's Artist's Materials series, presents the first technical study in English of this important painter.
2012
Lucio Fontana
Produced to accompany a retrospective exhibition marking the artist's centenary at the Hayward Gallery, this opulently illustrated book spans Fontana's prolific career and brings together over 100 of his sculptures and canvases as well as a reconstruction of one of his most physically impressive and distilled spatial environments.
2000
Lucio Fontana: Sculpture
Published in conjunction with the first United States museum exhibition dedicated solely to the artist's groundbreaking ceramic work, the book explores the innovative and often contrarian ways in which Fontana made use of the ceramics and clay modeling to explore larger problems in sculpture and painting.
2013
Lucio Fontana
From Fontana's early work in collaborating with architects through his years in Buenos Aires, his experimental light installations of the early 1950s, and his later experiments with various media, this book covers the entire career of Italy's pioneering abstract artist.