Lucio Fontana. Concetti spaziali

The exhibition set up by Erika Gysling-Billeter in the large hall showed around one hundred works by the Italian artist Lucio Fontana from the period 1947 to 1965. As the son of a sculptor, Fontana (1899-1966) emancipated himself early on from the art of his father's generation; his radical gestures stand for the new beginning after the end of the Second World War. As established as his position is from today's perspective, recognition during his lifetime was hesitant: It was not until he was 55 that his first solo exhibition took place at the Venice Biennale, followed shortly before his death by a first retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and a year later at documenta 4 in Kassel. As early as 1946, Fontana published the ‘Manifesto Blanco’ and called for an art that radically embraced matter, time and space. His innovation was small holes in the canvas, the so-called ‘bucchi’. Erika Gysling-Billeter explains: ‘Fontana's piercing of the canvas meant for him destruction of the traditional pictorial level, but at the same time the creation of a new dimension.’ From 1958 followed the monochrome canvases with one or more cuts (‘tagli’), which have become the artist's trademark. The non-repeatable cut has a similar physicality to the brushstroke in action painting, calligraphy or ink painting. Fontana's works, known as ‘concetti spaziali,’ were not only paintings by other means, however, but always sculptures as well: the canvas arches sculpturally and black gauze shimmers through from behind. ‘After World War II ... the cut-up picture, not the ‘destroyed’ picture, but the picture opened up by a careful, even cautious operation, could be recognized as a landmark of contemporary wisdom.’ (Laszlo Glozer, Süddeutsche Zeitung). Lucio Fontana was thus celebrated in this exhibition not simply as an inventor of highly aesthetic objects, but as a creator of works that live from a very special tension: they oscillate between an asserted spatial concept and what the artist was actually able to realize.