Lucio Fontana

Galerie de Bloe, Brussels
Private Collection (acquired from the above circa 1966)
Private Collection, Sweden (by descent from the above)
Sotheby's, London, 11 February 2005, Lot 180
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner 

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, cat. no. 65 T 80, p. 164, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, cat. no. 65 T 80, p. 574, illustrated

This work is in very good condition overall. There is some very minor hairline craquelure visible at the pull margins. The surface is bright, fresh and clean. Under very close inspection, there is a pinpoint loss in the lower left quadrant and along the upper left edge, and a pinpoint spot accretion in the lower right quadrant. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Framed under glass.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"The single slash on a white ground represents the extreme limit of Fontana's purity of thought and style. For all the grand immobility of the image, the tense moment of decision in which the artist took aim and discharged his inner power in a single stroke gives pictures like this all the dramatic intensity of a 'moment of truth.' A static present is thus accompanied by a highly agitated past and finds its resolution in a vaguely apprehended future within the obscure space behind the canvas."

Fred Licht in Exh. Cat., Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (and traveling), Omaggio a Lucio Fontana, 1988-1989, p. 58

Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese is a seminal example of the artist's revolutionary challenge to the illusion of painting. Through his innovative articulation of Tagli; elegant, pristine and clean cuts along the monochromatic surface of the canvas, Fontana secured his celebrated artistic legacy through his refinement of the sculptural language of painting. With utter deliberation and precision, the single Tagli originates in a fine point, evenly broadening and slicing through the center of the canvas. The blade of Fontana's Stanley knife traces along the surface, simply and delicately, inviting the viewer to engage beyond the two dimensional picture plane.

This utopian vision of Fontana’s cutting operative underscores the core tenants of Spatialism. As part of the iconic movement initiated in 1947 by the artist, the rupturing of the picture attests to an iconic advancement in the history of painting. Returning to Italy after a six-year absence in Argentina, he began a unique dialogue with the symbolic value of color, form, space and movement. Espoused in his early Manifesto Blanco, Fontana’s reduction of the elements of painting creates room for expansion beyond dimensional boundaries with his most important color, white. In his eyes, the distinctions between artistic disciplines had become obsolete. Thus, by isolating the artist as the source of creative energy in this alluring white arena, it provided the perfect setting for his conception of pure space.

Fontana’s concerns stretched beyond those of just painterly expression, to those of the infinite. A few months after Yuri Gagarin’s momentous flight in 1961, the artist was both fascinated and tormented by the awesome grandeur of space, and the potential catastrophic consequences of the first manned space flight. Polarities of light and shade, black and white, sculpture and picture plane are in essence a mediation of an ongoing negotiation in his art form. Hence, the abandonment of the traditional reference to canvas with the tactile blackness of deep space creates an illusionistic window into another world.

This radical other worldly gesture created in 1965, at the very height of the artist’s career, monumentalizes the impact of the single white Tagli. By this time, Fontana had established the cut as his principal painterly vernacular, only a year before he was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale. During the exhibition, Fontana recreated the Ambienta Spazialte with a monumental slash in white. In this moment, the individual laceration of the white canvas became the conceptual apex of Fontana’s oeuvre.

The present work is dedicated to one of the artist's muses, Alice Grodzensky, nicknamed 'Cinzia' who modeled for Fontana in the early 1960s. Prior to the Concetti, Fontana almost exclusively worked in three-dimensions until at the age of forty he abandoned his sculptural approach and began to cave out Tagli in his canvases instead. As Fontana spent much of his career working in the three-dimensional format, creating not only ceramics but also complex and intriguing sculptures of the human form, his Concetti were an indisputable artistic breakthrough. While the painted canvas was still damp, Fontana’s Stanley knife cut into its surface in a single, exact execution. Still resting on an easel, the incision was left to dry, leaving no room for error or deviation from the intended procedure. Once dry, Fontana would augment the opening with his hand. Black gauze was then adhered to the reverse of the canvas to bond the shape of the cut in its entirety.

This superlative cutting technique not only propelled Fontana’s dialectic between painting and sculpture, but also underpinned his rejection of gestural painting. Art Informel positioned the canvas as an arena for the artist to act and create an utterly new kind of art. Fontana transcended the mechanical indulgence of expressionism by correctly identifying the machine-like attributes that infiltrated gesture and thereby undermined the cult of individuality in painting. Fontana however, was not alone in his opposition to the dominating aesthetic of abstraction in Europe at the time. Yves Klein also had a radical new practice of art-making, and, in his 1957 exhibition of eleven monochrome blue paintings, all evidence of manual intervention and composition were removed. By collapsing the idea of painting as a window and painting as object, the physical virtue and space in painting is integrated. Similarly, in his cuts, Fontana drew attention to the materiality of the canvas by cutting into, while also, retaining the impression of pictorial depth.

Ultimately, Klein and Fontana propagated the simultaneous negation and preservation of illusion. In a 1968 interview, Fontana professed that his goal was to produce art that was “not an object, nor a form” (Anthony White, Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge 2011, p. 245). By producing paintings in which negative and positive space turn endless somersaults, and thereby prohibiting a coherent position to which to view his work, Fontana allegorized painting’s capacity to suggest a beyond. Forever fascinating and memorialized, a major exhibition of the artist's work is planned to take place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017.