Lucio Fontana

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Concetto Spaziale, la Fine di Dio, 1963, oil on canvas, Fondazione Lucio Fontana, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photography by Robert McKeever

artist

text by JEFF RIAN

 

I’d always liked the Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s slash paintings, but more out of curiosity than conviction. Then, this past May I saw a museum-quality mini-retrospective of Fontana’s work at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City: I became illuminated. I was converted.

Fontana’s best-known works are the aforementioned slash paintings, but beginning in the late ’40s he made what artists 50 years later called installation art, using neon lights, colored glass, metal sheets, and painted walls. He also began a series of abstract paintings whose surfaces he slashed, as if the cut embodied the body and soul of these paintings, their form and meaning. In the early-to-mid ’60s he constructed nearly human-sized, egg-shaped canvases, monochromes, which he painted in…