Collection: Fontana Lucio

(Rosario di Santa Fe 1899 - Comabbio 1968)

Painter, ceramicist, and sculptor, Lucio Fontana experimented in the early years with a figurative painting of academic origin before arriving at a form of radical abstraction. Founder of Spatialism, he is famous for his cut and perforated canvases: the cuts and holes were meditated and liberating gestures with which he sought to redefine and open space, to go beyond the surface, not simply to paint it.
His graphic production, concentrated in the years from 1951 to 1968, experimented with the same intensity across all printing techniques: engravings, lithographs, and screen prints, expressing on paper the same spatial obsession that runs through the canvases. The screen prints from the Teatrini series are works composed of two overlapping sheets, where one, irregularly shaped, serves as a scenic backdrop, while the other is die-cut with small holes. A construction in layers that translates into graphic terms the idea of space as real depth, not illusory, which is the heart of all his research. The paper itself becomes a material to be traversed, not a surface to stop on.