PRESENTATION: Lucio Fontana-Sculpture

Lucio Fontana is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative post-World War II Italian artists. Best known for his tagli (slashed, mostly monochromatic canvases) Fontana fashioned a remarkably multifaceted body of work that encompasses architecture, sculpture, and ceramics, as well as painting. In his quest to expand the vocabulary of his art, Fontana subjected the pictorial surface of his paintings to a remarkable assortment of punctures, gashes, and slashes, as well as adornments of glass fragments, glittering aluminum flakes, and sand.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

In the very same address where, in 1961, Lucio Fontana’s first solo show in the US was presented at the galleries of the legendary art dealers Martha Jackson and David Anderson, the exhibition “Lucio Fontana. Sculpture” featurea over 80 works on loan from important institutions and museums, the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and both private and public collections and shines a light on a critical dimension of the artist’s revolutionary practice that is rarely explored in depth outside of Europe. Best known for his “Tagli”, the slashed canvases that summarized and reinterpreted decades of research surrounding space and the conceptual value of gesture, sculpture was integral to Fontana’s artistic project and pivotal to its evolution. Having experimented with the medium from the beginning to the very end of his career, Fontana used sculpture as an opportunity to test, and put into practice, the exchange between form, color, matter and space, through a dialectical relationship between abstract and figurative, spatial and baroque. The exhibition teases that question by bringing together an array of three-dimensional works in terracotta, concrete, clay, plaster, metal, glass and wood made over the course of five decades, from the 1920s until the artist’s death in 1968. Here, they are placed in dialogue with paintings and drawings that act as a counterpoint to the gesturalism and methodology of the sculpture. In an homage to Fontana’s debut 1961 exhibitions in the United States, ‘the exhibition opens with a dazzling painting that was first presented in those exhibitions: “Concetto spaziale, La luna a Venezia” (1961). This canvas, which defies categorization, is juxtaposed with a rare nucleus of drawings reflecting the artist’s impressions of his initial visit to New York City, where he was guided by famed architect and Fontana collector, Philip Johnson. The exhibition continues with the rarely seen sculpture, “Nudo” (1926), and an exploration of pivotal works from the 1930s, including “Tavoletta graffita” (1931), “Figura alla finestra” (1931), “Scultura astratta” (1934), “Conchiglie e Farfalle” (1935-36) and “Cavalli marini” (1936). Made during a period of intense research, these pivotal works embody a particular syncretism between the abstract and the figurative and demonstrate how Fontana’s work began to express pure innovation and how, unfolding within the larger context of European sculpture-making, his radical output from this period was at once rooted in historical avant-garde art movements, while also reinterpreting those movements’ meaning. These sculptures were a prelude to Fontana’s experiments during the late 1940s, which, in their association with the birth of spatialism, were marked by both abstract and figurative explorations and were critical to developing the artist’s distinctive new style. In this regard, the “Scultura spaziale” (1947), a circle of matter imbued with a primordial force, is placed in dialogue with figurative works such as the monumental “Figura femminile con Fiori”  (1948). The second floor of the exhibition illustrates the tension generated between Fontana’s various Spatial Concepts (a title that Fontana started to adopt in 1946 for all of his spatialist works) and his figurative sculptures, made through his unique treatment of matter and color. Visitors will experience a visual journey through Fontana’s extraordinary lifelong creativity, from “Concetto spaziale” (1949)—the rare and first linen papers punctured with ‘holes’—to the multiform terracotta sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s as the spirited “Battaglie” and “Arlecchino” (1948-49). The final floor of the exhibition is dedicated to the evolution of Fontana’s sculptural experimentation during the late 1950s and 1960s. A grouping of “Concetto spaziale, Natura” illustrate an existential declaration of the artist’s spatial philosophy. The exhibition closes with the equally productive, albeit lesser-known period of the last years of the artist’s life, a moment where the boundaries between painting and sculpture were all but obliterated. The “Ellissi” (1967) and sculptures in metal described by critics as ‘space capsules’ were mechanically executed and demonstrate the final phase of Fontana’s aesthetic inquiries, in which the conceptual dimension became more prominent.

Photo: Lucio Fontana exhibition, Galerie, Iris Clert, Paris. 1961, November 10, © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014 4R, 20) Photo: Shunk-Kender

Info: Curator: Luca Massimo Barbero, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 32 East 69th St, New York, NY USA, Duration: 3/11/2022-4/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/