Lucio Fontana

LUCIO FONTANA (Rosario, Argentina, 1899 - Comabbio, Italy, 1968).
"Concetto spaziale oro", 1971.
Etching on invitation.
Edited by Rene Metrás.
Measurements: 23 x 15 cm; 35 x 28 cm (frame).
Fontana created many versions of this series, including works on monochrome canvas and multiple works on metal sheets.
A sculptor and painter, Fontana trained in Italy, at the Brera Academy in Milan, and was a disciple of A. Wildt. He made his individual debut in 1930 at the Il Milione gallery in Milan. In the thirties he traveled several times in Italy and France, establishing contact with the Lombard abstract movement and with the Abstraction-Création, as well as with the expressionists. He lived for some years in Paris and, during World War II, in Argentina. In Buenos Aires he founded the Altamira Academy and, in 1946, he wrote the "White Manifesto", a declaration of spatialist poetics that would take shape in the works realized after his return to Italy in 1947: the "environments", designed to be neither painting nor sculpture, but "forms, colors, sounds through space"; and the "spatial concepts", where the problem of the representation of space is faced through the perforation or cutting of the base used (paper, canvas, plastic, etc.). Fontana participated in the São Paulo Biennial, as well as in numerous exhibitions in Europe and Asia, as well as in London, Paris and New York. Shortly before his death, he was present at the "Art of Destruction, Destroy to Create" event at the Finch College Museum of Art in New York. Lucio Fontana is represented in leading modern art museums around the world, including the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the foundation that bears his name in Milan, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others.