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Lot Essay
Although Lucio Fontana is best known for his two dimensional works, particularly his "cut" paintings, sculpture was an equally important medium for the artist. Fontana's father was a sculptor and he began apprenticing in his workshop at age 11. Fontanta would work for him for the next decade, before opening his own shop. He worked in various styles, both figurative and abstract, in terracotta and clay (later in bronze). Indeed, most of his earliest exhibitions in the 1930's were in ceramics.
This work is from a series of sculptures, executed generally in terracotta, but sometimes cast in bronze, entitled Concetto spaziale, Natura. These works grew out of his cut paintings and the earliest works in the series were irregular, but flat terracotta panels with jagged slits in them. The present lot is among the most mature of the series, in which the artist has created a fully three-dimensional shape and gashed into its top, equally evoking an exotic plant or extra-terrestrial form. While most of the avant-garde at this time was either pursuing the constructivist path opened up by Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, or Arp's biomorphism, Fontana was creating a daring new form, brutal and daring in equal measure. Fontana's cared little for conventional beauty, and instead looked to alchemically change seeming dross materials and roughly realized forms into distinctive objects, simply by a selective process of cutting and gouging. The manipulation of space and its interaction with two and three dimensional form was his greatest contributions to 20th century art.
"In five hundred years time people will not talk of art, they will talk of other problems and art will be like going to see a curiosity like the two rocks put together by the first caveman. What were they up to? Why did they cover walls with pictures? Today man is on earth and these things are all things that man has done while on earth, but do you think man will have time to produce art while traveling through the universe? He will only have time to travel through space and discover marvelous things, things so beautiful that things here will seem worthless. Today's young people are still too tied to the earth. Man must free himself completely from the earth, only then will the direction that he will take in the future become clear. Today we are still too firmly glued to the earth. And since I believe in man's intelligence-- it is the only thing in which I believe, more so than in God, for me God is man's intelligence-- I am convinced that the man of the future will have a completely new world" (L. Fontana quoted in T. Trini, "The last interview given by Fontana," W. Beeren & N. Serota, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Amsterdam & London, 1988, p.36).
This work is from a series of sculptures, executed generally in terracotta, but sometimes cast in bronze, entitled Concetto spaziale, Natura. These works grew out of his cut paintings and the earliest works in the series were irregular, but flat terracotta panels with jagged slits in them. The present lot is among the most mature of the series, in which the artist has created a fully three-dimensional shape and gashed into its top, equally evoking an exotic plant or extra-terrestrial form. While most of the avant-garde at this time was either pursuing the constructivist path opened up by Picasso and Julio Gonzalez, or Arp's biomorphism, Fontana was creating a daring new form, brutal and daring in equal measure. Fontana's cared little for conventional beauty, and instead looked to alchemically change seeming dross materials and roughly realized forms into distinctive objects, simply by a selective process of cutting and gouging. The manipulation of space and its interaction with two and three dimensional form was his greatest contributions to 20th century art.
"In five hundred years time people will not talk of art, they will talk of other problems and art will be like going to see a curiosity like the two rocks put together by the first caveman. What were they up to? Why did they cover walls with pictures? Today man is on earth and these things are all things that man has done while on earth, but do you think man will have time to produce art while traveling through the universe? He will only have time to travel through space and discover marvelous things, things so beautiful that things here will seem worthless. Today's young people are still too tied to the earth. Man must free himself completely from the earth, only then will the direction that he will take in the future become clear. Today we are still too firmly glued to the earth. And since I believe in man's intelligence-- it is the only thing in which I believe, more so than in God, for me God is man's intelligence-- I am convinced that the man of the future will have a completely new world" (L. Fontana quoted in T. Trini, "The last interview given by Fontana," W. Beeren & N. Serota, Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Amsterdam & London, 1988, p.36).