Lucio Fontana (Santa Fè, Argentina, 1899 – Comabbio, VA, 1968).
Born in Argentina to an Italian family of artists – his father being a sculptor and his mother an actress – he moved to Milan in 1905. In fact, his first artistic works are sculptures made in his father’s studio in Argentina. Fontana trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera. During World War II, Fontana returned to Argentina, where he wrote his Manifesto Blanco. In 1947, he founded Spazialismo/Spatialism, which he defined in several manifestos as the concept that art should include an element of energy. Fontana highlighted the need for space to be seen dynamically by the viewer in a constant state of transition and tension.
Returning to Milan following the war’s end in 1948, Fontana created his notable series of Spatial Concept paintings, which were novel in his violent attack on the previously sacred surface of the canvas. By slashing and puncturing the picture plane, Fontana transitioned a flat surface into a three-dimensional one, engaging the viewer to look through the surface of the painting. Fontana’s most celebrated gesture, the cut, is a highly subversive gestural and precise slash used throughout his highly acclaimed Attese works. Fontana is recognized for his Spatial Environment installations of suspended gestural shapes, in which he employed new technological materials, such as neon, that are internationally acclaimed as pioneering works in installation art.
In 1966 he collaborated with La Scala Theater in Milan, designing sets and costumes. In the last years of his career, he became increasingly interested in the staging of his works in the many exhibitions dedicated to him around the world, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his later blank canvases. This is evident in the 1966 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Gran Premio della Pittura, and at Documenta in Kassel in 1968. His work has been widely internationally exhibited in New York, Milan, Zürich, London, Berlin, and Rome, and belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, among others.