Lucio Fontana Argentine-Italian, 1899-1968

Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1899, and died in Comabbio, Italy, in 1968. Fontana is renowned for his radical rejection of all traditional prerequisites for creating art, redefining the very notion of what art could be. Initially trained as a sculptor, Fontana divided his time between Italy and Argentina before the onset of World War II. Seeking refuge from the conflict, he returned to Buenos Aires, where in 1946 he founded the Altamira Academy, a hub of cultural exchange and intellectual fervour. It was here, within this dynamic environment of emerging artists and theorists, that the Manifesto Blanco (White Manifesto) was conceived. This pivotal text laid the theoretical foundation for Spazialismo (the Spatialist Movement), an avant-garde approach spearheaded by Fontana, which sought to synthesise space, time, and matter into a new artistic language.

Upon his return to Milan in 1948, Fontana embarked on his seminal Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) series, a body of work that would come to define his legacy. In these pieces, monochrome canvases were incisively slashed with tagli (cuts) or punctured with buchi (holes), creating ruptures that exposed the void beyond the surface. These incisions, both gestural and conceptual, challenged the sanctity of the canvas as a two-dimensional, inviolable plane, revealing a previously hidden spatiality. By tearing through the surface, Fontana introduced real space into the work, dissolving the illusionistic boundaries of traditional painting and suggesting the infinite expanse that lies beyond material form. Fontana’s revolutionary interventions – his acts of cutting and piercing – were more than mere formal experiments; they were a response to the cultural and technological shifts of the 20th century. For Fontana, the explosive scientific progress and rapid societal transformation of the post-war era demanded a new form of artistic expression, one that could encapsulate the boundless potential of the modern world. His works, imbued with the spirit of discovery, positioned art not as a static object but as an evolving force that engaged with the dynamic energies of space and time.

Fontana attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan from 1928 to 1930. Since 1930, his work has been exhibited regularly at the Venice Biennale and he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting in 1966. Major retrospectives of Fontana’s have taken place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, Venice; Hayward Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fundación ‘la Caixa’, Barcelona; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Fontana’s works can be found in the permanent collections of more than 100 museums around the world, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.