Concetto spaziale

Lucio Fontana was born in 1899 in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina. In 1920 he moved to Milan where he enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti and began his artistic career as a sculptor. The interest in space and cosmos in his production is evident from 1930, with the creation of abstract and instinctive sculptures that expanded into space, which also conveyed his desire to break with the Italian Novecento movement. Fontana's artistic exploration culminated in 1947 the founding of the movement known as Spazialismo and from this moment onwards, all of Fontana's works had the title of Concetto Spaziale. Rather than the means and materials, the key concept of Spazialismo was the impact of the creative gesture, considered immortal and eternal: from the end of the 1940s, Fontana's works seem suspended in a universe which defies time. Traditional media such as paper, canvas, oil and ceramic were never abandoned by the artist, but used in innovative ways, a process regarded by the artist as a necessary evolution in Modern Art. The Buchi, holes, first emerged in 1949 on paper, when the artist designed a spatial installation at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. From the creation of the Buchi onwards, throughout the 1950s and 60s, the oeuvre of Fontana was dedicated to the search of the 4th dimension in art, mainly through the use of the canvas. The latter was scratched, cut, and violated: the only ways to allow the painting to become the bridge to an infinite dimension, which did not impose a theme, but created the condition for the viewer to envision it from the emotions received.