Lucio Fontana

Camuffo, Venice

Galerie Couturier, Paris

Private Collection, Paris

Galerie Dr. Luise Krohn, Badenweiler

Private Collection, Germany (acquired directly from above circa 1982)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Environments Spatiaux, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, p. 198, no. 68 T 37, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 684, no. 68 T 37, illustrated

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Vol. II, Milan 2006, p. 878, no. 68 T 37, illustrated

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is darker in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are tiny spots of red coloured paint to the lower left corner and along the right edge and small spots of blue paint to the lower left corner, which appear to be original. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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A lyrical single slash on the unsullied surface of raw canvas, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa is a supreme paragon of Lucio Fontana’s revolutionary artistic expression. Enshrining the single most iconic act of the artist’s career on a rare unprimed canvas, the present work stands among the most powerful and undiluted expressions of Fontana’s ground-breaking rupture of normative spatial and visual concepts. Created in 1968 and one of less than 25 works executed on unprimed canvas between 1959 and 1968, the present work counts among the rarest of the Concetto Spaziale, Attesa. It was produced at the very apogee of Fontana’s extraordinary artistic career, two years after the artist was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting at the XXXIII Venice Biennale. Amidst the wide variety of works articulated in a multitude of colours with numerous cuts in varying scales, the present work is an exquisitely rare example of Lucio Fontana’s most revered and instantly recognised body of work, the tagli.

The first tagli date to the autumn of 1958 and by 1960 Fontana had executed tagli works in an expansive variety of experimental colours including yellow, orange, red, pink, ochre, turquoise, blue, purple, brown, grey, gold, silver, and black. Against this panoply of pigments, and the variety of slash quantities and arrangements that Fontana explored, the single elongated slash upon a raw untarnished surface distills the artist’s radical artistic act – piercing the canvas – into its most elemental presentation. On a physically formal level, as powerfully articulated in the present work, the single slash preserves the greatest tension within the canvas flesh, heightening the viewer’s perception of contending binaries whose dynamic marriages fill Concetto Spaziale, Attesa with symbolic interaction between light and dark, release and contraction, void and plane. Fontana gave expression to this ground-breaking breach of the untarnished and untouched primed canvas and explained: “With the taglio, I have invented a formula that I think I cannot perfect…. I succeeded in giving those looking at my work a sense of spatial calm, of cosmic rigor, of serenity with regard to the Infinite. Further than this I could not go” (Lucio Fontana quoted in: Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 58).

Contemporaneously in tune with an international political context of technological ambition and progression, Fontana’s oeuvre speaks to the age of space exploration and discovery. With these works Fontana hypothesised overturning accepted norms of three-dimensional Cartesian space by invoking and venturing into the fourth dimension of time. Whilst embodying an art historically iconoclastic and destructive act, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa simultaneously invokes a futuristic spirit of evolution to engender an object of votive worship offered up to an era of conceptual innovation and radical technological progression.