Lucio Fontana: Piercing Canvases of Contemporary Art, Literally

Description

Every artist has their unique way to leave a mark on the art world. For Picasso, it was cubist muses; for Zhang Daqian, ink-splashed landscapes fusing form into atmosphere. Yet, Lucio Fontana went a step further. In an upcoming exhibition, Spatialism. Pioneering the Contemporary, his works turn the canvas into gesture — pierced, slashed and charged with light.

A major survey of the Argentine-Italian pioneer (1899–1968),  curated by Luca Massimo Barbero with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, the exhibition charts the evolution of spatialism from 1949, which saw the birth of iconic elements like buchi (holes) and tagli (cuts). It then moves into the late 1950s and 1960s, where rare multielement and irregularly shaped constructions, including the Quanta canvases and the geodesic bronze Nature sculptures, took shape. Fontana’s punctured and slashed surfaces in pieces such as “Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1964” (Spatial Concept, Expectations), exposing the void beyond the canvas and redefined how art interacts with surrounding space.

The Hong Kong staging concludes a trilogy after shows in Los Angeles (2020) and New York (2022–23), and is accompanied by a new Hauser & Wirth Publishers volume — the first widely available introduction to Fontana’s career that spanned from the 1920s to late 1960s in simplified Chinese, featuring translated writings by the artist himself.