Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana was the Italian Argentine artist whose punctured and slashed canvases opened painting onto real space. Founder of Spatialism, he set out in his Manifesto Blanco and later writings to unite color, sound, movement, and time within a single spatial concept. The Concetto Spaziale works, in which the surface is pierced or cut, remain among the pivotal gestures of postwar European art, linking the historical avant gardes to the generations that followed. His work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan. Concetto Spaziale, 1968, shown here, comes from the final phase of a practice that treated the canvas as a threshold into space itself.