Lot 37
  • 37

Lucio Fontana

Estimate
300,000 - 400,000 GBP
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Description

  • Lucio Fontana
  • Concetto Spaziale
  • signed; signed and titled on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 65 by 54 cm. 25 1/2 by 21 1/4 in.
  • Executed in 1961.

Provenance

Giovanni Leombianchi Collection, Milan

Private Collection, Milan

Exhibited

Milan, Centro Annunciata, Lucio Fontana ispiratore dello Spazialismo, February – March 1983, n.p., no. 27, illustrated

Literature

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environments spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 115, no. 61 O 111, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Fontana, Catalogo generale, Vol. I, Milan 1986, p. 386, no. 61 O 111, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 572, no. 61 O 111, illustrated

Condition

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Catalogue Note

"I make a hole in a canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface."

Lucio Fontana cited in: Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1988, p. 34.

Created during a period of intense artistic output, Concetto Spaziale is a sumptuous manifestation of Fontana’s revolutionary exploration into space and colour. Engaging with new techniques in his Olii series, the present work perfectly demonstrates the fusion of the artist’s ventures in oil paint with his spatial experiments of slashing and puncturing the canvas, further expanding on his philosophical and conceptual innovations. Composed of a large incised circle and two crossed lines juxtaposed with a deep puncture in the lower right of the canvas, the present work creates a magnificent interplay between the delicacy of the furrowed lines and the violence of thick encrusted paint around the orifice, which evokes the visceral image of turning a knife in a wound.

Fontana’s gesture of incising the canvas in this way exemplified his intellectual theory on ‘Spatialism’, on which he published five manifestos between 1947 and 1952. In these writings, Fontana stated that his art sought to articulate the ‘fourth dimension’ by ways of conceptual depth beyond the two-dimensional canvas plane. Fontana continued to engage with these ideas for the entirety of his career, and his Buchi, Tagli and Olii in particular break with the traditional norms of painting by deliberately incorporating the space behind the plain surface. The artist wrote: "A butterfly in space excites my imagination: having freed myself from rhetoric, I lose myself in time and begin my holes" (Lucio Fontana cited in: Leonardo Sinisgalli, Pittori che scrivono. Antologia di scritti e disegni, Milan 1954, p. 115). The effect of scientific and technological progress of this particular period was of further importance to Fontana. Fascinated by the idea of space exploration, the artist was deeply impacted by the first moon exploration which had been launched only two years prior to the execution of the present work.

Concetto Spaziale perfectly illustrates Fontana’s exploration of the possibilities of scoring and scraping the canvas to the extent that the medium crosses the threshold between painting and relief sculpture. Through experimenting with the malleable properties of oil paint, Fontana’s concretions and manipulations of the surface by etching, moulding and puncturing creates radical visual and spatial effects. Furthermore, by introducing luscious red and bright orange tones, Fontana gives the work an added sensual dimension evoking carnal flesh. As Fontana said, “the cuts that I made so far represent above all a philosophical space. But that which I am seeking, now, is no longer philosophical space but rather physical space… a dimension which man can even inhabit… It is a human dimension that can generate physiological pain, a terror in the mind, and I, in my most recent canvases, am trying to give form to this sensation” (Lucio Fontana cited in: Exh. Cat., Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 24). By engaging with the concepts of creation and destruction, gesture and emotion, the material and the immaterial, the present work is a powerful expression of Fontana's core artistic beliefs.