Lucio Fontana

Galerie Loehr, Frankfurt (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the family of the present owner in 1968

Berlin, Situationen 60 Galerie; Frankfurt, Galerie Loehr, Lucio Fontana - Herman Goepfert – Jef Verheyen, 1965
Wuppertal, Kunst-und Museumsverein, Hommage à Fontana, 1969, p. 6, no. 1

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is light canvas draw in the upper left corner. Upon close inspection, there is extremely light wear and handling towards all four corners. There is a faint nail impression on the centre-right on the lower edge with a small faint mark above this. There are a small number of unobtrusive pin sized fly spots scattered throughout the composition. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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"I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture. With my innovation of the hole pierced through the canvas in repetitive formation, I have not attempted to decorate a surface, but on the contrary; I have tried to break its dimensional limitations. Beyond the perforations, a newly gained freedom of interpretation awaits us, but also, and just as inevitably, the end of art."

Lucio Fontana, 1966

Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale is remarkable not only for its purity of form and colour, but also as one of the earliest examples of the artist’s Buchi: the powerful piercing of the canvas to create a three-dimensional hole. Fontana had returned from an extended stay in Argentina, the land of his birth, in 1947, ready to search for an entirely new artistic language, one far removed from the more traditional style he had been working in prior to his departure. Trained as a sculptor, Fontana sought to move outside the confines of the canvas ground, utilising the space beyond as a key part of the composition. The corresponding puncturing of the canvas – here, in gently serried rows – evokes associations with the night sky, glimmering with a myriad of stars: a tribute to the unbounded glories of the galaxy. The artist was fascinated by the possibilities of space exploration, a field of scientific research that was still very much in its infancy in the late 1940s.

 

The use of the oval within Concetto Spaziale, subsumed into an egg-like form, is particularly significant: according to Fontana, the Ova symbolised “the infinite, the inconceivable chaos, the end of figuration, nothingess” (Exhibition Catalogue, Lucio Fontana, London, Hayward Gallery, 1999-2000, p.198). Traditionally seen as a fertility symbol and bringer of life, the egg is imbued with diverse layers of symbolism, a powerful constant within the art historical lexicon from the work of Renaissance masters such as Piero della Francesca to the more contemporary experimentations of Piero Manzoni (a close friend of Fontana) through to Jeff Koons’s witty interpretations in the twenty-first century. Yet there is an inherent delicacy to the egg as source of life: a fracture of the eggshell being an all too constant possibility. In Concetto Spaziale, Fontana has rendered the traditional function of the egg effectively obsolete through the puncturing of the surface, whilst still maintaining the innate grace of the ovoid shape.

 

In its form and glorification of the possibilities of the Buchi, Concetto Spaziale anticipates Fontana’s magnificent La Fine di Dio works, created between 1963 and 1964, a series which Sarah Whitfield described as “[representing] the moment in which all Fontana’s concerns seem to come together in perfect resolution” (Sarah Whitfield, Ibid. p. 46). Within the later series, the entire canvas has become egg-shaped and the holes have magnified in size and shape, their edges created with a greater sense of violence and unpredictable force. Concetto Spaziale of 1949 is thus a remarkably prescient work, and is arguably a critical precursor to the much later La Fine di Dio series. Ultimately, Concetto Spaziale is not only a superb work by an artist who was on the cusp of forging a totally unprecedented creative language, but also perfectly epitomises the artistic concerns which were to dominate the remainder of his career.