Throughout his career, Fontana's sculptures become increasingly abstract. From 1949 onwards, he began his 'Spatial Concept' series, consisting of holes or slashes punctured through the surface of his canvases and sculptures, effectively cutting between the space occupied by the viewer, through the surface, to the space that lies beyond. Fontana saw this as evocative of infinity, claiming "My discovery was the hole and that's it. I am happy to go to the grave after such a discovery."

The present work was the only ceramic to be included in Fontana's 1977 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum retrospective in New York, and was recently included in the major travelling exhibition Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao).

With its smooth, iridescent high gloss surface, Fontana's Concetto Spaziale (1962-64) sees Fontana revisiting the Spatalist ideas from his Nature series of 1959, in which the artist molded terracotta into solid meteorites which he then cut, gouged, or punctured. Produced during an epoch defined by the so-called 'Space Race', which saw the first manned spaceflight in 1961, Concetto Spaziale (1962-64) marks a further development of Fontana's Spatialist investigations. Punctuated by two holes through the dense clay and polychromatic glaze, this work embraces a primordial dynamism while achieving Fontana's mission for a unity of nature, matter and existence.