Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), the artist who took abstract painting into the third dimension by puncturing and slashing his canvases, perhaps unsurprisingly considered himself above all a sculptor. Throughout his career, in works which radically defied traditional categories of painting and sculpture, he relentlessly explored the subject of space by defining and redefining its relationship to the viewer through the investigation of the three-dimensional properties of a wide range of materials, from canvas and metal to glass and clay.
In feats of modern alchemy, Fontana transformed humble materials into potent modes of intellectual transport, testing the possibilities of space to discover galaxies of opportunity beyond. Vividly animating and rupturing the space around them, Fontana's expressive, luminously coloured ceramics, both abstract and figurative, are among the artist's most innovative and experimental works, at once gestural performances of artmaking and meditations upon its infinite potential.
Press release courtesy Robilant+Voena.