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Lot Essay
‘My father was a good sculptor, I wanted to be a sculptor too, I would have liked to be a painter, too, like my grandfather, but I realized that these specific art terms are not for me and I felt like a Spatial artist. That’s exactly it. A butterfly in space excites my imagination: having freed myself from rhetoric, I lose myself in time and begin my holes’
- Lucio Fontana
With its scarred, incised surface painted in lustrous tones, Concetto Spaziale (1956) stems from Lucio Fontana’s series of ‘spatial’ sculptures. Created between 1950 and 1958, these glazed terracotta panels provided the artist with a vital forum for experimentation that fed directly into his paintings: the present work combines elements of his buchi (‘holes’), initiated in the late 1940s, with vertical slashes that foreshadow the tagli (‘cuts’) begun in 1958. Some of Fontana’s earliest artistic experiments, dating to the 1930s, had been in the medium of ceramics – indeed, it was through this body of work that he came to realise his aesthetic aims. ‘The problem of making art instinctively became clearer to me’, he recalled; ‘neither painting nor sculpture, nor lines delimited in space, but continuity of space in matter’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delta Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 118).
Fascinated by the developments of the Space Age, which had revealed to mankind the infinity of the cosmos, Fontana sought an art form that was similarly progressive – a series of ‘spatial concepts’, or Concetto Spaziali, that transcended the boundaries between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture. Through the tactile medium of ceramics, the artist set about exploring this no-man’s-land, creating works that simultaneously protruded into space and revealed the dark, mysterious void beyond the picture plane. The inherently chance-based nature of the medium was instrumental to his creative development: advances in science had revealed the plasticity of time and space, and the malleability of ceramics allowed Fontana to channel the spirit of these discoveries into art. Shimmering like a constellation, or a planetary surface photographed from space, the present work bears witness to an artist who – like the scientists and astronauts of his day – devoted his life to extending the frontiers of knowledge.
- Lucio Fontana
With its scarred, incised surface painted in lustrous tones, Concetto Spaziale (1956) stems from Lucio Fontana’s series of ‘spatial’ sculptures. Created between 1950 and 1958, these glazed terracotta panels provided the artist with a vital forum for experimentation that fed directly into his paintings: the present work combines elements of his buchi (‘holes’), initiated in the late 1940s, with vertical slashes that foreshadow the tagli (‘cuts’) begun in 1958. Some of Fontana’s earliest artistic experiments, dating to the 1930s, had been in the medium of ceramics – indeed, it was through this body of work that he came to realise his aesthetic aims. ‘The problem of making art instinctively became clearer to me’, he recalled; ‘neither painting nor sculpture, nor lines delimited in space, but continuity of space in matter’ (L. Fontana, quoted in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delta Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 118).
Fascinated by the developments of the Space Age, which had revealed to mankind the infinity of the cosmos, Fontana sought an art form that was similarly progressive – a series of ‘spatial concepts’, or Concetto Spaziali, that transcended the boundaries between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture. Through the tactile medium of ceramics, the artist set about exploring this no-man’s-land, creating works that simultaneously protruded into space and revealed the dark, mysterious void beyond the picture plane. The inherently chance-based nature of the medium was instrumental to his creative development: advances in science had revealed the plasticity of time and space, and the malleability of ceramics allowed Fontana to channel the spirit of these discoveries into art. Shimmering like a constellation, or a planetary surface photographed from space, the present work bears witness to an artist who – like the scientists and astronauts of his day – devoted his life to extending the frontiers of knowledge.