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Lot Essay
With a lustrous black surface, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, 1965-1966, is an outstanding example of the artist’s distinctively tactile and animated surfaces. For Concetto spaziale Fontana has perforated the sphere with his characteristic buchi, holes, which erupt from the glossy black expanse; the artist has kept the underside smooth, inscribing a thin line to divide these hemispheres. Apertures were fundamental to Fontana’s art, and he declared, ‘If any of my discoveries are important, the ‘hole’ is…I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else’ (L. Fontana quoted in T. Trini, ‘The Last interview given by Fontana’, W. Beeren and N. Serota (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1988, p. 34). These punctures are breathtakingly simple as they incorporate three-dimensional space into the very substance of the work itself.
The 1960s were a triumphant decade professionally for Fontana, during which he had solo exhibitions in Milan, Venice, Brussels, and Japan, and embarked upon the Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio, a series of ovoid oil paintings that were the extraordinary summation of his lifelong pursuit of infinity. By then, Fontana had already mastered Spatialism, the pioneering movement he had founded in 1947, which sought a new art that synthesized light, space and time. In the openings of Concetto spaziale, Fontana has introduced an element of the endless and incomprehensible, a space where ‘measurement and time no longer exist’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana; Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipiniti, ambientazione, vol. 1, Milan, 2006, p. 81). In its undulating and unfixed surface, Concetto spaziale appears terrestrially grounded, but instead extends towards the impossible.
The 1960s were a triumphant decade professionally for Fontana, during which he had solo exhibitions in Milan, Venice, Brussels, and Japan, and embarked upon the Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio, a series of ovoid oil paintings that were the extraordinary summation of his lifelong pursuit of infinity. By then, Fontana had already mastered Spatialism, the pioneering movement he had founded in 1947, which sought a new art that synthesized light, space and time. In the openings of Concetto spaziale, Fontana has introduced an element of the endless and incomprehensible, a space where ‘measurement and time no longer exist’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana; Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipiniti, ambientazione, vol. 1, Milan, 2006, p. 81). In its undulating and unfixed surface, Concetto spaziale appears terrestrially grounded, but instead extends towards the impossible.