(Rosario di Santa Fe, Argentina 1899–1968 Comabbio)
Concetto Spaziale, 1962/65, signed l. Fontana, holes and graffiti on coloured glazed ceramic, 25 x 27 x 22.5 cm, (AR)

Watch Video: Contemporary Art | November 2015 | Lucio Fontana 
Watch Video: Contemporary Art | November 2015 | Italian Contemporary Art 

Photo certificate:
Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan Archive no. 1135/12

Provenance:
European Private Collection

As Argan wrote, “Fontana’s abstract sculptures are certainly not sculptures. Sculpturally, they are unfinished, nor are they a cultural experience, since the contemporary existence of other, profoundly different works deprives them of their potential significance as a ‘phase of transition’ in the artist’s career. Rather, they more likely ought to be regarded as having experimental value: they are an investigation aimed at determining a new dimension that cannot be defined with the usual categories of depth and planes, and is valid only for the identity of sign and colour it postulates.”

In 1962 Fontana created new glazed ceramics, often marked on the sides with a stroke that was an allusion to a transition, a transversal line separating the two hemispheres along the equator. The body is warped and features holes [...] that open like amorphous craters, perhaps echoing his oil paintings, creative equivalents from the same period. [...]

In a few cases (such as his “Venezie” cycle from those years) Fontana resorted again to the use of gold, a shimmering, Byzantine gold.
(Luca Massimo Barbero in “The Fontana I love”, Galleria Tonelli, Milan, Studio La Città, Verona, 2015)

The work Concetto Spaziale - Natura exemplifies all this very clearly.
In this fascinating egg-shaped sculpture with elegant colouring, all the tenets of Fontana’s poetics converge, such as the search for the infinite empty space beyond matter, the fundamental relationship between light, space and colour, in this case creating magnificent, intriguing changing effects of gold and violet. The smooth, ‘satin’ golden surface is disrupted by a hole at its centre – a crater emerging from the silent matter which, in Fontana’s hands, seems to be alive and boil like magma in perpetuity.

A while ago, a surgeon came to visit me in my studio, and he told me that he was also very capable of making ‘these holes’. I responded to him that I too can cut off a leg, but I also know that the patient will die of it. If he cuts it, however, it’s a different situation. Fundamentally different.
(Lucio Fontana)

From an important Private Collection

additional image:
Lucio Fontana, Milan 1962
© Archivio Ugo Mulas
© Bildrecht, Wien, 2015