Lucio Fontana

Through a selection of drawings and sculptures, this publication offers a new interpretation of the work of Argentine Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), moving away from its masculine connotations to examine the feminine aspects of the “cuts,” “holes” and graphic representations created with primary, furtive gestures.

This project marks the first ever comparison between the works of Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) and Alberto Giacometti (1901–66). It highlights the intersections between their artistic expressions while living in an era afflicted by questions about man and his role in the universe.

Hauser & Wirth’s new Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) publication charts the uncategorizable artist’s exploration of sculpture from the 1930s until his death. In a substantial essay, curator and leading Fontana scholar Luca Massimo Barbero explores ceramics as “the ideal material for the Fontanian gesture” and reexamines Fontana’s experimentation with terracotta, clay, plaster, concrete and metal. Researcher Cristina Beltrami resituates Fontana as a pioneering artist in the European postwar context, investigating his exchanges with other Italian and international practitioners.
The monograph, a collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, also includes a biographical essay by the foundation’s Maria Villa, tracing the artist’s life through his ever-innovating sculptural practice, and serves as a companion volume to Lucio Fontana: Walking the Space.

This massive survey is the most complete and updated publication to explore the ceramic work of Argentine Italian painter, sculptor and theorist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), presenting approximately 2,000 pieces made from 1936 to 1966. The result of a shared project between Fontana scholars Enrico Crispolti and Luca Massimo Barbero, the catalog provides a thorough account of Fontana’s oft-overlooked history with the medium, as well as his critical role in 20th-century art.
Organized in chronological and thematic order—the latter of which is divided into two sections, “Figurative” and “Spatial”—works are accompanied by bibliographical and exhibition references, informed by fresh research. Barbero’s ambitious vision for the book was made possible by Fondazione Lucio Fontana’s meticulous archival process, carried out over the course of more than 50 years.

Famed for his iconic monochrome canvases with violent vertical cuts, Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) is one of the most important avant-garde artists of the 20th century and he continues to inspire artists, designers and architects today. Lucio Fontana: The Conquest of Space highlights Fontana's “Concetto spaziale,” or “spatial concept,” and shows how these spatial notions took shape not only in his slashed canvases but also in his sculpture, jewelry and installations.
For Fontana, there was no fundamental distinction between the visual arts, architecture and design: he was a sculptor by trade and refused to be limited by disciplines in his conception of space. He was one of the first visual artists to create spatial installations with floating sculptures and neon lights, and to collaborate with architects and designers. This lavish catalog contains 100 reproductions of his groundbreaking work.

Lucio Fontana’s (1899–1968) Ambienti spaziali, or Spatial Environments, were immersive installations that included neon crystal tubes, paint that glowed under black light and captivating papier-mâché sculptures. Fontana’s use of technology pushed the boundaries of art beyond the canvas to “paint” with light and invite viewers into the physical space of the work itself. In spring 2020 Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles staged the first comprehensive presentation of Ambienti spaziali in the United States, carefully reconstructing the installations as they initially appeared from 1948 to the final years of the artist’s life. This accompanying volume is edited in collaboration with Milan’s Fondazione Lucio Fontana and includes a survey of Fontana’s contributions to the evolution of conceptual art, tracing his influence on other legendary figures such as Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell.

Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) radically transformed our conception of painting, sculpture and space by transcending the two-dimensionality of the canvas, foreshadowing many movements of the 1960s and '70s such as Arte Povera, conceptualism and land art. As the founder of Spatialism, an artistic movement that emerged in Italy in the late ’40s, Fontana did away with the distinction between painting and sculpture, with his famous slashes and holes in the canvas. Environments is focused on Fontana’s pioneering work in installation art, with a selection of his seminal Ambienti spaziali (seen together for the first time). The Ambienti spaziali—rooms and corridors that the artist began to conceive and design in the late 1940s—were almost always destroyed once the exhibition was over; they are Fontana’s most experimental yet least-known works, due to their ephemeral nature.

A new privileged point of view and an original take on the evolution of Fontana's oeuvre through his complete graphic work. This catalogue raisonne of the works on paper by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) is one the most complete and cutting-edge publications on the work of one of the leading protagonists of the twentieth-century's artistic development. Experimentation on paper was Fontana's chosen means to test the richness and novelty of his inspiration.

This catalogue raisonne covers four decades of this creative activity, starting with the astonishing corpus of figural works and culminating in his original invention of spatial art, which led to the creation and development of the highly individual “holes,” “environments,” and “slashes.” The study includes extensive and heretofore unpublished documentation on Fontana's dialogue with architecture and decoration and his experimentation with unusual techniques and materials. Including more than 5,000 works executed between 1928 and 1968, with individual entries that include bibliographical and exhibition reference, this volume is an essential and updated tool for scholars, collectors, museum operators, and art dealers who wish to become thoroughly familiar with Fontana's oeuvre.

Luca Massimo Barbero, a scholar and critic specializing in modern and contemporary art, is currently associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.

An unparalleled exhibition catalogue of Lucio Fontana’s architectural work. For the first time in the United States, the exhibition Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali presents a substantial number of the spatial environments conceived by the artist between 1948 and 1968, works that can be regarded as forerunners of the environments created by figures such as Allan Kaprow and Robert Irwin and the light art of the likes of Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman. The book reproduces all the works in the exhibition, including drawings, sketches, environments, sculptures, and paintings.

Germano Celant was senior curator of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1989 to 2008. Internationally known for his writings on Arte Povera, in 1987 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award. He has been a contributing editor at Artforum since 1977 and at Interview since 1991. Among his books: Anselm Kiefer: Salt of the Earth (Skira, 2012); Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works (Skira, 2011); Piero Manzoni (Skira, 2009), among many others.

The catalogue raisonné of the work of the Italian painter and sculptor presents a historical profile of the artist's complete body of work. Organized chronologically and subdivided into categories of the extremely broad creative oeuvre of Lucio Fontana (Rosario de Santa Fé, 1899–Varese, 1968), one of the leading exponents of the international artistic avant-garde of the Twentieth century, this general annotated catalog of sculpture, painting, and “Ambientazioni” presents a rigorous historical and critical profile of the creative corpus of the artist “of the two worlds” at his highest expressive intensity and quality.”

Enrico Crispolti is Professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Siena. A historian of nineteenth and twentieth century art and a militant art critic, Crispolti is the author of countless monographs and, in addition to the general catalog of Fontana, he has edited the general catalog of the work of Baj and Guttuso. Nini Ardemagni Laurini is president of Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan. Valeria Ernesti was vice president of Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan.“