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拍品专文
"We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist". (L. Fontana et al, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946).
Offering a comprehensive examination of many of the key ideas within Lucio Fontana’s oeuvre, Concetto Spaziale, Aurora di Venezia and Concetto Spaziale, Notturno di Venezia represent a pivotal moment within the artist’s career. Bringing together several of his most notable series in a marriage of forms and space, both works represent the infinite variability of Fontana’s practice. Primary among the artist’s concerns was a reexamination of artmaking at the dawn of the Space Age. Even by 1948, he had pushed beyond traditional boundaries and fully committed to prioritizing artwork evolving at the pace of technology, declaring, “Today, we spatial artists have escaped from the cities, we have shattered our shell, our physical crust, and we have looked at ourselves from above, photographing the earth from rockets in flight” (L. Fontana, Second Spatial Manifesto, March 1948, reproduced in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 118). Often creating tears and punctures in the material surface, Fontana physically confronted old ways of thinking and literally opened up his artwork to new space for ideas to flourish.
Given the ovoid shapes of both works, as well as their realization in the last few years of Fontana’s life, the current selection relates foremost to the artist’s series La fine di Dio (The End of God). Made up of oblong canvases which the artist coated in paint and then punctured with fingers and tools, this much-lauded series draws direct parallels to both Concetto Spaziali being considered here. However, these works with glass also connect formally to another of Fontana’s innovations: Le Pietre (Stones), which he worked on from 1952-56. Covered with pieces of colored glass, these paintings contrasted the negative space of puncture marks with the positive protrusion of the ‘stones’ adhered to the canvas surface. Likewise, the glass elements attached to the current examples act in a similar, although more elaborate manner. A further connection can be made to I Metalli (Metal Sheets) which stemmed from the artist’s stay in New York and his awe of the metal and glass skyscrapers. The present examples exhibit similar bases of thin metal punctured by holes and add electric light to the equation that seeps from the artist’s incursions on the surface. As these Concetto Spaziali were created toward the end of Fontana’s life, it is prudent to see them as a way of presenting his dossier of experiments in an indexical mode.
The present works were made in collaboration with the Italian glassmaker Egidio Constantini. Working out of the Venetian artist’s cooperative Fucina degli Angeli, Fontana was one of several world-renowned artists who came to Murano to work with the famed glass maker. Among the creative minds attached to projects at the center were artists as diverse as Mark Tobey, Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Oskar Kokoschka. It was through the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim that these artists and Fontana connected with Constantini and that the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibition of the resulting glass sculpture in 1965. The Concetto Spaziali that Fontana created at Fucina degli Angeli were not the first time he had used products from Murano artisans in his work. As mentioned, his Pietre compositions were bejeweled with glass stones made on the island and featured a melding of positive and negative forms that is reprised in the current examples.
Fontana’s career revolved around an overriding concept that he termed Spatialism. Derived from a publication titled Manifesto Blanco which he and a group of other avant-garde artists published in his native Argentina in 1946, this idea came about as a way to reckon with the fallout of World War II. As society reeled from the catastrophic events of that conflict, Fontana maintained that an ideological shift was needed to break from the past. Urging artists to look beyond the traditional and beyond earthly means of creation, the treatise insisted, “We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist.” Instead, Fontana and his cohorts wanted to work toward an art that was “based on the unity of time and space” (L. Fontana et al, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). From this catalyst, Fontana began to explore the surface of the canvas with his buchi (holes) and tagli (cuts) which he saw as a way to both track the passing of time and also to incorporate intrusive actions within his concetto spaziale (spatial concept). “I do not want to make a painting,” he noted. “I want to open up space” (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1974, p. 7). By combining his signature punctures with luminous, transparent objects formed by master glass artisans, Fontana lets light and space pierce his compositions as they endeavor to become one with the atmosphere.
"I do not want to make a painting. I want to open up space". (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1974, p. 7).
Offering a comprehensive examination of many of the key ideas within Lucio Fontana’s oeuvre, Concetto Spaziale, Aurora di Venezia and Concetto Spaziale, Notturno di Venezia represent a pivotal moment within the artist’s career. Bringing together several of his most notable series in a marriage of forms and space, both works represent the infinite variability of Fontana’s practice. Primary among the artist’s concerns was a reexamination of artmaking at the dawn of the Space Age. Even by 1948, he had pushed beyond traditional boundaries and fully committed to prioritizing artwork evolving at the pace of technology, declaring, “Today, we spatial artists have escaped from the cities, we have shattered our shell, our physical crust, and we have looked at ourselves from above, photographing the earth from rockets in flight” (L. Fontana, Second Spatial Manifesto, March 1948, reproduced in Lucio Fontana, exh. cat. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 118). Often creating tears and punctures in the material surface, Fontana physically confronted old ways of thinking and literally opened up his artwork to new space for ideas to flourish.
Given the ovoid shapes of both works, as well as their realization in the last few years of Fontana’s life, the current selection relates foremost to the artist’s series La fine di Dio (The End of God). Made up of oblong canvases which the artist coated in paint and then punctured with fingers and tools, this much-lauded series draws direct parallels to both Concetto Spaziali being considered here. However, these works with glass also connect formally to another of Fontana’s innovations: Le Pietre (Stones), which he worked on from 1952-56. Covered with pieces of colored glass, these paintings contrasted the negative space of puncture marks with the positive protrusion of the ‘stones’ adhered to the canvas surface. Likewise, the glass elements attached to the current examples act in a similar, although more elaborate manner. A further connection can be made to I Metalli (Metal Sheets) which stemmed from the artist’s stay in New York and his awe of the metal and glass skyscrapers. The present examples exhibit similar bases of thin metal punctured by holes and add electric light to the equation that seeps from the artist’s incursions on the surface. As these Concetto Spaziali were created toward the end of Fontana’s life, it is prudent to see them as a way of presenting his dossier of experiments in an indexical mode.
The present works were made in collaboration with the Italian glassmaker Egidio Constantini. Working out of the Venetian artist’s cooperative Fucina degli Angeli, Fontana was one of several world-renowned artists who came to Murano to work with the famed glass maker. Among the creative minds attached to projects at the center were artists as diverse as Mark Tobey, Pablo Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Oskar Kokoschka. It was through the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim that these artists and Fontana connected with Constantini and that the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibition of the resulting glass sculpture in 1965. The Concetto Spaziali that Fontana created at Fucina degli Angeli were not the first time he had used products from Murano artisans in his work. As mentioned, his Pietre compositions were bejeweled with glass stones made on the island and featured a melding of positive and negative forms that is reprised in the current examples.
Fontana’s career revolved around an overriding concept that he termed Spatialism. Derived from a publication titled Manifesto Blanco which he and a group of other avant-garde artists published in his native Argentina in 1946, this idea came about as a way to reckon with the fallout of World War II. As society reeled from the catastrophic events of that conflict, Fontana maintained that an ideological shift was needed to break from the past. Urging artists to look beyond the traditional and beyond earthly means of creation, the treatise insisted, “We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist.” Instead, Fontana and his cohorts wanted to work toward an art that was “based on the unity of time and space” (L. Fontana et al, Manifesto Blanco, Buenos Aires, 1946). From this catalyst, Fontana began to explore the surface of the canvas with his buchi (holes) and tagli (cuts) which he saw as a way to both track the passing of time and also to incorporate intrusive actions within his concetto spaziale (spatial concept). “I do not want to make a painting,” he noted. “I want to open up space” (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1974, p. 7). By combining his signature punctures with luminous, transparent objects formed by master glass artisans, Fontana lets light and space pierce his compositions as they endeavor to become one with the atmosphere.
"I do not want to make a painting. I want to open up space". (L. Fontana, quoted in J. van der Marck and E. Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1974, p. 7).