Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to participate in Art Basel Features. Lucio Fontana: From Figuration to Abstraction explores Fontana's beginnings as a sculptor and encompasses works spanning the artist’s career, including seminal ceramics, terracottas and bronzes from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Whilst Fontana today is heralded for his iconic buchi (holes) and tagli (cuts) paintings, his sculptures mark the very genesis of his unremitting exploration of Spatialism.
We are also showing at Art Basel Unlimited and we are pleased to present a monumental work by Alighiero Boetti from his eponymous Ononimo series; it is the largest of the artist’s Biro (ballpoint pen) works along with I sei sensi. There are five works of this scale in the series, another of which is housed at the Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota, Japan. The title is a play on the Italian for ‘anonymous’ and ‘homonymous’ in reference to the problems of authorship confronted by so many of Boetti’s works. The Biro works operate on two levels: the mechanization of the production and the standardization of the ‘ononymous’ agent. Boetti introduced one of the principal concerns at stake within contemporary art production: the space between artisan and author. Ononimo is a superb example of this ground breaking dialogue.
