Edited with text by Luca Massimo Barbero. Foreword by Paolo Laurini. Text by Maria Villa, Cristina Beltrami.
On Fontana’s decades-long experiments in terracotta, plaster, concrete, metal and more
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.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Brooklyn Rail
Choghakate Kazarian
Fontana’s fast-working hands left the stage to artisans’ slow-worked surfaces and mechanical means that, by excessive polishing, eliminated any trace of the process, displaying a clean and pristine surface. Fontana cut his hands, but the sensuous remains on the surface, whether touched or untouched by them.
Hyperallergic
Michael Glover
The sculptural works that pre-date the coming of the slashman are truly remarkable, rapidly improvised free-form fabrications, often made by hand in clay, which possess an extraordinary visceral power and energy, wrenching and kneading human forms into quasi-mythical beings, or creating abstract shapes which possess the weird forcefulness of elemental explosions.
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 12.5 in. / 216 pgs / 107 color / 110 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $91 ISBN: 9783906915708 PUBLISHER: Hauser & Wirth Publishers AVAILABLE: 2/14/2023 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Edited with text by Luca Massimo Barbero. Foreword by Paolo Laurini. Text by Maria Villa, Cristina Beltrami.
On Fontana’s decades-long experiments in terracotta, plaster, concrete, metal and more
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.
