Lucio Fontana biography
- LUCIO FONTANA ARTIST
Lucio Fontana was a painter, sculptor It is Italian potter naturalized Argentine. He was born in Rosario de 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.
Back in 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 letting himself be influenced by cubism.
In 1927 he returned to Milan where he enrolled in theBrera Academy of Fine Arts and follows the courses of Adolf Wild.
In 1930 he participated in the XVII Venice Biennial with the sculptures Eva It is Fascist victory and holds his first solo show at Galleria del Milione in Milan exposing Black man. The work, which will start the cycle of human figures reduced to geometric shapes, represents a break with the past, in particular with the Wildt 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 again in Argentina and together with other abstract artists he wrote the white manifesto with which 'A change in essence and form is required. It requires the overcoming of painting, sculpture, poetry and music. A greater art is needed in accordance with the demands of the new spirit.'
Back in Milan, in 1947 together with Beniamino Joppolo, Giorgio Kaisserlian It is Milena Milani found it Spatialism, an artistic movement supported by the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice.
In 1949 he deepened space research with the start of the cycle of Holes, works on monochrome canvas characterized by vortexes of holes made with an awl.
From the beginning of the 1960s, Lucio Fontana concentrated with particular effort 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 US solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery di New York. In the same year, inspired by the New York metropolis, he conceives i Metal, mirroring plates on which he intervenes by tearing and cutting the surface. An unstoppable series of solo exhibitions followed in Milan, Venice, Tokyo, London and Brussels.
In 1963 he started perhaps the most iconic series of his artistic production, the God's end, oval-shaped canvases, monochrome or sometimes sprinkled with sequins, crossed by holes and tears, exhibited for the first time at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan.
He will test his creativity again in 1964 with the series of Theaters, works in which the lacquered wooden frames are shaped and compose different 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 of Varese, in 1968 at the age of 69.