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Lot Essay
‘I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist. I have never turned a plate on a wheel nor painted a vase. I detest lacy designs and dainty nuances’ —L. FONTANA
‘I was thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these ... holes, this atrocious unnerving silence, and the astronauts in a new world. And, then, these ... in the artist’s imagination ... these immense things billions of years old – man arrives, in this deathly silence, in this anguish, and leaves a living sign of his presence ... were these not the solid shapes that bore signs of wanting to make inert matter come alive?’ —L. FONTANA
‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin, is different from ours … He who flies in space is a new type of man, with new sensations, not least painful ones’ —L. FONTANA
Acquired by the present owner in 1969, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (1962) is a captivating orb of lustrous black ceramic, its surface scored round to create two hemispheres and its upper half erupting with ragged, directional holes that seem to have burst from within. Below, Fontana has inscribed his signature in a large, exuberant hand. Revisiting the ideas of his Nature series of 1959, in which he formed solid meteorites of terracotta or bronze gashed with his distinctive tagli (cuts) or gouged with buchi (holes), this work elegantly brings Fontana’s Spatialist explorations of the void and man’s presence in the universe – themes excitingly relevant following the first manned spaceflight of 1961 – into conversation with the sculptural roots of his practice. Evoking an asteroid or planet coursing through space, the work directly references the form of the globe, a mode of three-dimensional mapping by which humanity has situated its terrestrial existence for centuries; by rupturing its surface with a constellation of buchi, Fontana opens the infinite fourth dimension of space that he had explored through his slashed and punctured canvases since the early 1950s. The work’s enigmatic cosmic presence is heightened by its high-gloss black glaze, which at once reflects and absorbs light – this Concetto Spaziale is a solid material object, but is cloaked in the non-colour of the abyss.
Fontana’s earliest artworks were produced in ceramic. He spent the spring of 1936 at Albisola, a small city on the Ligurian coast that had become the centre of a circle of Futurist artists interested in ceramic production; he also worked in ceramic at the Manufactures Sèvres in France, and later in his birth country of Argentina, before his return to Italy in 1947. He would restlessly model sea creatures and baroque figures at high speed, enjoying the instantaneous fusion of pigment and surface when the glaze was fired. ‘I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist,’ he wrote in 1939. ‘I have never turned a plate on a wheel nor painted a vase. I detest lacy designs and dainty nuances’ (L. Fontana, ‘La mia ceramica,’ Tempo, 21 September 1939). With their gaping and incised spheroid forms, the Nature of 1959 represented a later evolution in sculpture in his practice, incorporating the Spatialist ideas set out in his 1946 Manifesto Bianco, which called for ‘art based on the unity of time and space’ (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). With the Nature, he explained, ‘I was thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these ... holes, this atrocious unnerving silence, and the astronauts in a new world. And, then, these ... in the artist’s imagination ... these immense things billions of years old – man arrives, in this deathly silence, in this anguish, and leaves a living sign of his presence ... were these not the solid shapes that bore signs of wanting to make inert matter come alive?’ (L. Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, p. 194).
Concetto Spaziale, with its deftly cratered oil-black skin and expressively scored equator, takes these ideas even further through a virtuoso revisiting of ceramic as medium. Fontana was particularly fascinated at this point by the physical and mental tolls placed on astronauts, which had become matters of great public interest since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering voyage into space in April 1961. The welts in Concetto Spaziale’s northern hemisphere echo those of the canvases Fontana produced in the same year, in which he would enlarge holes with his fingers as if tearing at a wound. Discussing the increasing violence of his 1962 works, Fontana said ‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin, is different from ours … He who flies in space is a new type of man, with new sensations, not least painful ones’ (L. Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2000, p. 197). The bursting globe of Concetto Spaziale can be seen to reflect not only Gagarin’s historic orbit of the earth, but also the vulnerability of the body in space, and the profound danger invited by human endeavours into the infinite unknown. The innocence and optimism of Fontana’s 1940s Spatialist vision, fuelled by the gathering momentum of scientific knowledge, was scarred with corporeal drama once the physical reality of space travel was achieved. Much like the similarly climactic Fine di Dio canvases which would follow in 1963-64, Concetto Spaziale is a thrilling and dynamic object, embodying both the excitement of exploration and the grandeur of catastrophe as man journeys to the end of the universe.
‘I was thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these ... holes, this atrocious unnerving silence, and the astronauts in a new world. And, then, these ... in the artist’s imagination ... these immense things billions of years old – man arrives, in this deathly silence, in this anguish, and leaves a living sign of his presence ... were these not the solid shapes that bore signs of wanting to make inert matter come alive?’ —L. FONTANA
‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin, is different from ours … He who flies in space is a new type of man, with new sensations, not least painful ones’ —L. FONTANA
Acquired by the present owner in 1969, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (1962) is a captivating orb of lustrous black ceramic, its surface scored round to create two hemispheres and its upper half erupting with ragged, directional holes that seem to have burst from within. Below, Fontana has inscribed his signature in a large, exuberant hand. Revisiting the ideas of his Nature series of 1959, in which he formed solid meteorites of terracotta or bronze gashed with his distinctive tagli (cuts) or gouged with buchi (holes), this work elegantly brings Fontana’s Spatialist explorations of the void and man’s presence in the universe – themes excitingly relevant following the first manned spaceflight of 1961 – into conversation with the sculptural roots of his practice. Evoking an asteroid or planet coursing through space, the work directly references the form of the globe, a mode of three-dimensional mapping by which humanity has situated its terrestrial existence for centuries; by rupturing its surface with a constellation of buchi, Fontana opens the infinite fourth dimension of space that he had explored through his slashed and punctured canvases since the early 1950s. The work’s enigmatic cosmic presence is heightened by its high-gloss black glaze, which at once reflects and absorbs light – this Concetto Spaziale is a solid material object, but is cloaked in the non-colour of the abyss.
Fontana’s earliest artworks were produced in ceramic. He spent the spring of 1936 at Albisola, a small city on the Ligurian coast that had become the centre of a circle of Futurist artists interested in ceramic production; he also worked in ceramic at the Manufactures Sèvres in France, and later in his birth country of Argentina, before his return to Italy in 1947. He would restlessly model sea creatures and baroque figures at high speed, enjoying the instantaneous fusion of pigment and surface when the glaze was fired. ‘I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist,’ he wrote in 1939. ‘I have never turned a plate on a wheel nor painted a vase. I detest lacy designs and dainty nuances’ (L. Fontana, ‘La mia ceramica,’ Tempo, 21 September 1939). With their gaping and incised spheroid forms, the Nature of 1959 represented a later evolution in sculpture in his practice, incorporating the Spatialist ideas set out in his 1946 Manifesto Bianco, which called for ‘art based on the unity of time and space’ (Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires 1946, in E. Crispolti et al. (eds.), Lucio Fontana, Milan 1998, p. 116). With the Nature, he explained, ‘I was thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these ... holes, this atrocious unnerving silence, and the astronauts in a new world. And, then, these ... in the artist’s imagination ... these immense things billions of years old – man arrives, in this deathly silence, in this anguish, and leaves a living sign of his presence ... were these not the solid shapes that bore signs of wanting to make inert matter come alive?’ (L. Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, p. 194).
Concetto Spaziale, with its deftly cratered oil-black skin and expressively scored equator, takes these ideas even further through a virtuoso revisiting of ceramic as medium. Fontana was particularly fascinated at this point by the physical and mental tolls placed on astronauts, which had become matters of great public interest since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering voyage into space in April 1961. The welts in Concetto Spaziale’s northern hemisphere echo those of the canvases Fontana produced in the same year, in which he would enlarge holes with his fingers as if tearing at a wound. Discussing the increasing violence of his 1962 works, Fontana said ‘They represent the pain of man in space. The pain of the astronaut, squashed, compressed, with instruments sticking out of his skin, is different from ours … He who flies in space is a new type of man, with new sensations, not least painful ones’ (L. Fontana, quoted in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2000, p. 197). The bursting globe of Concetto Spaziale can be seen to reflect not only Gagarin’s historic orbit of the earth, but also the vulnerability of the body in space, and the profound danger invited by human endeavours into the infinite unknown. The innocence and optimism of Fontana’s 1940s Spatialist vision, fuelled by the gathering momentum of scientific knowledge, was scarred with corporeal drama once the physical reality of space travel was achieved. Much like the similarly climactic Fine di Dio canvases which would follow in 1963-64, Concetto Spaziale is a thrilling and dynamic object, embodying both the excitement of exploration and the grandeur of catastrophe as man journeys to the end of the universe.