Collector Walls: When art becomes architecture

W hen Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana arrived in New York in November 1961, the city’s harsh winter air was not the first thing he noticed. He glanced up to see buildings like he had never seen before: columns of glass and steel that pierced through the clouds, the sun ricocheting off their mirrored facades. At night, the skyscrapers would come alive, city lights dancing across their surfaces.

Fontana had seen modernity before, but not at this scale. It was here, amid the glimmering labyrinth of skyscrapers, that he conceived his legendary “Metalli” series: a group of artworks that saw him abandon the canvas in favor of the metallic surface. He punctured, ruptured and slashed sheets of metal as he had done before with his knife and the canvas, but now with heightened aggression and intensity. He would use hand tools such as awls, punches and chisels to pierce and gouge the metal. These were not neat, machined holes—he intentionally allowed the material to resist him, creating jagged, irregular perforations. The violence of the gesture was key. “Sometimes scratching them vertically to convey the idea of skyscrapers, sometimes puncturing them with a metal punch, sometimes flexing them to suggest dramatic skies,” Fontana would later recount.

Four years later, in 1965, astronaut Alexei Leonov became the first human to perform a spacewalk. That same year, grainy images captured by NASA revealing the surface of Mars were beamed back to Earth. It was a transformative year for human exploration and scientific discovery. Now, back in his Milan atelier, Fontana followed these developments closely. Deeply inspired by the ongoing space race and the chase for discovery and the unknown, Fontana eagerly pushed his own creations to grow in size and ambition. Among the works he created in 1965 was “Concetto Spaziale,” a monumental diptych forged from copper. The glowing hues of orange emanating from the copper plates echoed those first images of the Mars surface, the holes he broke through the plates like craters from an otherworldly terrain.

Just after completion of the diptych, the work was acquired by Fontana’s friend, collaborator and supporter, Mario Bardini, who had been closely following Fontana’s trip to New York, as revealed in personal letters between the two. “New York is more beautiful than Venice! The skyscrapers of glass look like great cascades of water that fall from the sky!” Fontana wrote to him.

A photograph from Bardini’s villa in Varigotti, in northern Italy, reveals the work in a particularly unusual setting: mounted above his fireplace. Bardini, an architect by trade, had first met Fontana in the 1950s and collaborated with him on a series of site-specific projects —such as slicing through the walls and ceilings of hotels and residential buildings— that combined Fontana’s artistic practice with Bardini’s architecture. Bardini’s decision to mount the “Concetto Spaziale” to look like an architectural element may have been an homage to their collaboration, transforming his own fireplace into a grand artwork. The Fontana remained in Bardini’s collection until 2004, a year before his death.

In 2004, film producer Ronnie Sassoon was sitting in her London living room, sifting through a Sotheby’s auction catalogue. “I saw a photograph of the Fontana and simply had to acquire it,” she tells me. At the time, she had been on the hunt for one of the artist’s “Natura” sculptures, but the luminous, industrial presence of the “Metalli” caught her attention. Already a collector of Fontana’s work—including a canvas with seven tagli (Italian for “cuts”) and a “La fine di Dio” (one of a rare group of egg-shaped canvases)—this was her first Fontana that wasn’t white. Sassoon has a decisive eye. Her collection always falls within a chromatic group: black, white, brown and the occasional hint of metal.

After successfully outbidding a number of important dealers, Sassoon brought the Fontana to New York—the original site of its conception—and hung it in her Soho loft. Like Bardini, Sassoon had an unusual idea for the hang. She positioned the work between two 19th-century fire escape windows so that it appeared to float in the space. “Fontana once said thathe was more interested in what was beyond the canvas rather than just the mere surface, so I thought he might approve,” she notes.

During the pandemic, Sassoon left the city and sought refuge in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. There, the Fontana found a new home in the Weston House—a two-story modernist structure perched high on a hillside, designed by Carl Strauss and Ray Roush. Mounted on the central wall in the living room, the Fontana hung right below a slim horizontal window. Rays of light streamed into the room, reflecting off the copper canvas.

Fontana’s cuts, once deemed radical, feel just as electrifying today. In a time defined by rupture—technological, political, environmental—they remind us of the importance of seeing beyond the surface of things, for chasing a new future rather than retreating into the past. Sassoon, like many Fontana aficionados, once considered Fontana’s “Metalli” to be secondary to his works on canvas. However, after living with the copper piece for 20 years, she views it as “one of the most important works I’ve ever owned.”