Lucio Fontana Argentina / Italy, 1899-1968

Overview
Image courtesy: Adagp, Paris
Image courtesy: Adagp, Paris

"I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space"

-Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 - 7 September 1968) was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism.

 

Fontana's work focused largely on the spatial qualities of sculpture and paintings with the goal of breaking through the two-dimensionality of the traditional picture plane. Fontana is best known for his monochrome canvases known as 'Concetti Spaziale' that he would cut or puncture, leaving distinctive slash marks and holes. In his seminal writing, White Manifesto (1946), Fontana proposed ideas for the creation of a new medium that blends architecture, painting, and sculpture.
 
Fontana died on September 7, 1968 in Varese (Italy) two years after being awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Kunstmuseum in Basel, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, among others.
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