Lucio Fontana biography

Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and ceramicist naturalized from Argentina. Born in Rosario di Santa Fé in Argentina in 1899. The young Lucio Fontana was sent by his family to study in Milan where he obtained a diploma as a building expert at the Carlo Cattaneo Technical Institute. Returning to Argentina in 1921, he began working in his sculptor father's studio. In 1924 he opened his own sculpture studio, abandoning his father's realistic style and allowing himself to be influenced by Cubism. In 1927 he returned to Milan where he enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and followed the courses of Adolfo Wildt.
In 1930 he participated in the XVII Venice Biennale with the sculptures Eva and Vittoria fascista and held his first solo show at the Galleria del Milione in Milan exhibiting Uomo nero. The work, which will begin the cycle of human figures reduced to geometrical shapes, represents a break with the past, in particular with Wildt's school, and the beginning of a personal artistic research.
From 1935 to 1939 he dedicated himself with particular intensity to the activity of ceramist, working in the factory of his friend Giuseppe Mazzotti in Albisola.
From 1940 to 1947 he was once again in Argentina and together with other abstract artists he wrote the Manifiesto blanco with which 'A change in essence and form is requested. It requires going beyond painting, sculpture, poetry and music. Greater art is necessary in accordance with the needs of the new spirit.
Back in Milan, in 1947 together with Beniamino Joppolo, Giorgio Kaisserlian and Milena Milani he founded Spatialism, an artistic movement supported by the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice.
in 1949 he deepened his spatial research with the start of the cycle of Buchi, monochrome works on canvas characterized by vortices of holes made with an awl.
Since the beginning of the sixties, Lucio Fontana has concentrated with particular commitment on the series of Oils, works on canvas where the thick layer of pictorial material is crossed by holes or lacerations.
In 1961, he held his first solo American exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. In the same year, inspired by the New York metropolis, he conceived the Metalli , mirrored sheets on which he intervenes by tearing and cutting the surface. An unstoppable series of personal exhibitions followed in Milan, Venice, Tokyo, London and Brussels.
In 1963 he launched perhaps the most iconic series of his artistic production, the End of God, oval-shaped canvases, monochrome or sometimes sprinkled with sequins, crossed by holes and lacerations, exhibited for the first time at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan.
He will put his creativity to the test again in 1964 with the series of Teatrini, works in which the lacquered wood frames are shaped and compose differentiated shapes and in 1967 with the series of Ellipses, elliptical tables of lacquered wood variously colored and crossed by machine-made holes. Lucio Fontana died in Comabbio, in the province.