Lucio Fontana

Biography

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina, in Rosario di Santa Fé, son of Italians. After his studies in Italy, Fontana returned to Argentina where he collaborated with his father, sculptor and architect, in the production of funeral monuments. In 1927 he returned to Italy and enrolled at the Brera Academy where he took adolfo Wildt's sculpture course. He graduated in 1930 and immediately began the activity of sculptor that led him to be present at the Venice Biennale of the same year. In 1931 he exhibited at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, continuing to exhibit there in the following years regularly. In these years it is linked to the Group of Lombard Abstractists and the international movement "Abstraction-Création". In 1939 he returned to Argentina where in 1946 he published his "Manifiesto Blanco" in which he laid the foundations of the Spatialism he developed after his return to Italy in 1947. In fact, in 1947 he published the first "Manifesto of Spatialism" which is signed by Giorgio Kaisserlian, Beniamino Joppolo and Milena Milani. Then follow other posters on Spatialism touching all artistic forms even the nascent television. The ideas are realized with the presentation of the works at the Venice Biennale of 1948 and at the Galleria del Naviglio in 1949, where the first "Space Environment" shows the overcoming of the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture and their merging into the " Spatial Concept of Art". In this period Fontana operates the first holes in the canvases and realizes the large-scale neon that he presents at the Triennale di Milano in 1951.  In recent years the neon has been redone and stands on the ceiling of the highest hall of the Museo del Novecento in Milan, also visible from Piazza Duomo. In 1958 it was presented at the Biennale di Vernezia and in 1959 at the Galleria del Milione he presented the first cycle of the "Tagli" where with the gesture of cutting the canvas Fontana opens the work to the third dimension, that is to the space. He then glues variously colored glass sedges onto the canvas giving the works a baroque flavor. Then follow the cycles of the Teatrini,nature, fine di Dio,space environments, carried on until his death in 1968.

Tags: Lucio Fontana - Fontana - Adolfo Wildt - Venice Biennale - Manifiesto Blanco - Spatialism - Space Manifesto - Tagli- Teatrini - End of God

Lucio Fontana - Spatialism

Spatialism is identified with Lucio Fontana who set the conditions in his "Manifiesto Blanco" of 1946 when he was still living in Argentina. Although other artists, such as Roberto Crippa, adhered to Spatialism, Fontana remains the undisputed master of this movement, the other artists who learned its principles are defined with the term postspatialists among which we include above all Paolo Scheggi and Vanna Nicolotti . The assumption of Spatialism is that the canvas can have a third dimension while remaining a flat surface. The third dimension more than physical is a mental dimension, left to the imagination or to the inner feeling of the viewer. The origin dates back to when Lucio Fontana was a child and went to peek inside the churches through the ajar doors, seeing little but imagining a lot. Hence the origin of the cuts on the canvas that, except for the first ones, have the flaps folded inside the canvas to favor the attraction of the viewer from the unknown space that the cut creates.

In 1951, during a conference at the Triennale di Milano, Fontana defined Spatialism in these terms: " an art based on the unity of time and space. Spatialists will create in spaces and through spaces the new fantasies of art. We conceive art as a sum of physical elements, color, sound, movement, time, space, conceiving a physical-psychic unity, color the element of space, sound the element of time and the movement that develops in time and space. They are the fundamental forms of spatial art"

tags: Spatialism - Lucio Fontana - Fontana - Paolo Scheggi - Vanna Nicolotti - spatial art - postspatialists