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Lot Essay
‘My father was a good sculptor, I wanted to be a sculptor, I would have liked to be a painter, too, like my grandfather, but I realised that these specific art terms are not for me and I felt like a Spatial artist.’ – Lucio Fontana
Enlivened by an invigorating energy and dynamic sense of movement, Lucio Fontana’s Mujer desnudándose (Woman Getting Undressed) is a striking example of the sculptor’s emerging interests in spatial flux. Mujer desnudándose was originally owned by Pablo Edelstein, one of Fontana’s pupils and co-author of the Manifesto Blanco, 1946, and this provenance is complemented by the alternative title Fontana bestowed upon the work: El viento en Catamarca, or ‘the wind of Catamarca’. Located in northwest Argentina, Catamarca is notorious for its blustery, howling winds, and this poetic title here evokes a sublime momentum and madness, embodied in the present work. At once figurative and abstract, the disrobing nude triumphantly flings her clothing over her head. Her roughly-modelled body, sculpted in ochre, appears to melt, suggesting incandescent yet tactile impermanence. Mujer desnudándose presents Fontana’s early endeavours to specialise the visual. Inspired by both contemporary scientific advances, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as by Boccioni’s dynamic sculptures, Fontana began investigating the interpenetration of sculptural form and negative space as a means through which to orchestrate flux. As he wrote in the Manifesto Blanco, ‘Man is tired of the forms of painting and sculpture. The oppressive repetitions show that these arts have stagnated in values that are extraneous to our civilization, and have no possibility of development in the future… we abandon the practice of all the forms of known art, we commence the development of an art based on the unity of time and space’ (Manifesto Blanco, 1946, in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 116). In Mujer desnudándose, Spatialist concerns are displayed in the manner in which Fontana convincingly arrests movement in time, accelerating away from canonical conventions towards a future-oriented sculpture.
Enlivened by an invigorating energy and dynamic sense of movement, Lucio Fontana’s Mujer desnudándose (Woman Getting Undressed) is a striking example of the sculptor’s emerging interests in spatial flux. Mujer desnudándose was originally owned by Pablo Edelstein, one of Fontana’s pupils and co-author of the Manifesto Blanco, 1946, and this provenance is complemented by the alternative title Fontana bestowed upon the work: El viento en Catamarca, or ‘the wind of Catamarca’. Located in northwest Argentina, Catamarca is notorious for its blustery, howling winds, and this poetic title here evokes a sublime momentum and madness, embodied in the present work. At once figurative and abstract, the disrobing nude triumphantly flings her clothing over her head. Her roughly-modelled body, sculpted in ochre, appears to melt, suggesting incandescent yet tactile impermanence. Mujer desnudándose presents Fontana’s early endeavours to specialise the visual. Inspired by both contemporary scientific advances, including Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as by Boccioni’s dynamic sculptures, Fontana began investigating the interpenetration of sculptural form and negative space as a means through which to orchestrate flux. As he wrote in the Manifesto Blanco, ‘Man is tired of the forms of painting and sculpture. The oppressive repetitions show that these arts have stagnated in values that are extraneous to our civilization, and have no possibility of development in the future… we abandon the practice of all the forms of known art, we commence the development of an art based on the unity of time and space’ (Manifesto Blanco, 1946, in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1998, p. 116). In Mujer desnudándose, Spatialist concerns are displayed in the manner in which Fontana convincingly arrests movement in time, accelerating away from canonical conventions towards a future-oriented sculpture.