Lucio Fontana

Acquired directly from the artist by the father of the present owner
Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana 1899-1968, a Retrospective, 1977,  p. 103, no. 99 illustrated
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, '60 '80, A Selection from Twenty Years of Visual Arts, 1982, p. 120, no. 2,  illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 136, no. 63 FD 20, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 468, no. 63 FD 20, illustrated

La Fine di Dio translates as "The End of God" and is the name Fontana gave to his series of large oval-shaped paintings executed over an eighteen-month period between 1963 and 1964. Of identical dimensions and different monochrome hues, each of these 38 canvases epitomise the dynamic maturity of Fontana’s creative vision expressed through his highly original vocabulary of forms. For the artist they symbolised, "infinity, the inconceivable thing, the end of figuration, the principle of the void," themes that underlie his best work. (Lucio Fontana in interview with Carlo Cisventi 1963, Exhibition Catalogue. Palazzo delle Espozizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 244) Characterised by their punctured moonscape surfaces which evoke a sense of infinite space and erupting baroque exuberance, the Fine di Dio are is widely regarded as being Fontana’s most powerful and important series. Acting as a self-referential commentary on the iconic spirituality of his own paintings, this series wields a dramatic formal presence that is rarely paralleled within Fontana’s oeuvre, whilst beautifully conveying the enigmatic complexity of his philosophical and artistic innovations. With its powerful fusion of order and turmoil, light and dark, form and void, purity and contamination, the present work represents one of the most exquisite paintings from this iconic series ever to come to auction.

Few abstract artists of the post-war period have been able to focus so fervently upon the fundamental idioms of matter and space as Fontana did, whose career is marked by a measured sense of artistic improvement and growing maturity climaxing in creation of the Fine di Dio series. Fontana was amongst the first artists since Malevich to explore the expressive power of monochromatic painting ,and he was particularly influential in his combination of the monochromatic picture field with a number of spatial concepts that enabled him to master and explore a wide array of formal and chromatic effects.

Fontana’s artistic maturity of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s coincided with the golden era of space exploration; the cosmos and mankind’s voyage into the unknown exerting a powerful lifelong fascination over the artist’s own journey into the boundless depths artistic expression. Initiated a few months after Yuri Gagarin’s momentous first manned flight into space, the Fine di Dio series can be interpreted as powerful meditations on the awesome grandeur of the universe and of mankind’s fear of the unknown. Fontana firmly believed that the aim of art was to respond to the new challenges that scientific and technological breakthroughs were constantly posing, and to extend the boundaries of painting towards new and unexplored spatial dimensions. It followed that if space was conquerable, what else could man tame in God’s universe? As such his work dared to contend with previously unimaginable realities, none more so than the bewildering concept of Fine di Dio.

First exhibited in 1963 under the title Le Ova at the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan, Fontana’s subsequent change of title to the more provocative and irreverent Fine di Dio, "hints at the possibility that underlying all of Fontana’s art is the desire to find an imagery universal enough in its appeal to usurp centuries of Christian symbolism." (Exhibition Catalogue, The Hayward Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1999, p. 46) This change of title has been the subject of much diverse critical interpretation, prompting speculation and a variety of possible interpretations. Was it intended to announce an artistic language that transcends the confines of past Christian imagery? Or was it perhaps a reference to the end of the flat picture surface’s authority in art? It has also been suggested that it was a pun based on the fact that ‘fine’ in Italian has the double meaning of "end" and "goal". Either way, it matters not when confronted with the constellated beauty and inherent spirituality of the present work, in which the shimmering white surface and animalistic ruptures evoke a mystery and cosmic silence that transcends the boundaries of space and time.

Within the embryonic form of an oval – a universal symbol of birth and regeneration - Fontana was able to unleash the full force of his signature rupture whilst bringing together many of his earlier ideas in harmonious fusion. Like his bucchi and attese, the expressive punctured holes breaking through the canvas were intended as gestural metaphors, windows into a boundless and dimensionless space beyond man’s intellectual capacity to understand, and subsequently beyond his concept of God. As Fontana explained, "Now in space there is no longer any measurement. Now you see infinity in the Milky Way, now there are billions and billions…. The sense of measurement and of time no longer exists. Before it could be like that…but today it is certain, because man speaks of billions of years, of thousands and thousands of billions of years to reach, and so, here is the void, man is reduced to nothing… When man realises that he is nothing… that he is pure spirit he will no longer have materialistic ambitions… man will become like God, he will become spirit. This is the end of the world and the liberation of matter, of man… And my art too is all based on this purity of the philosophy of nothing, which is not a destructive nothing but a creative nothing… And the slash, and the holes, the first holes, were not the destruction of the painting… it was a dimension beyond the painting, the freedom to conceive art through any means, through any form." (Lucio Fontana in Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Lucio Fontana, 1998, p. 246)

The egg white oval of the present work emits a reassuring tranquillity that is dynamically contrasted with the raw and expressive picture surface. Astral and mysterious, the Fine di Dio have a sense of impregnation and mystery that enables them to embody a range of diverse meanings both symbolic and formal. Just as the raw meteoric roundness of his ‘Nature’ series took on the appearance of galactic seeds ready to burst forth, so the ruptures of Fine di Dio take on a cosmic significance that prophetically foreshadows the imminent first photographic evidence of the scarred lunar surface that were to change our understanding of the galaxy irreversibly.