Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), a major figure of postwar European art, blurred numerous boundaries in his life and his work. Moving beyond the slashed canvases for which he is renowned, this book takes a fresh look at Fontana’s innovations in painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, and installation art. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} Fontana was an important figure in both Italy and his native Argentina, where he pushed the painterly into the sculptural and redefined the relationship between mediums. Archival images of environments, public commissions, installations, and now-destroyed pieces accompany lavish illustrations of his work from 1930 to the late 1960s, providing a new approach to an artist who helped define the political, cultural, and technological thresholds of the mid-twentieth century.

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative post-World War II Italian artists. This title presents a technical study in English of this important painter and an informative overview of Fontana's life and work.

In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Relating Fontana's art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar "economic miracle." At a time when Fontana's work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance.

Explores an international network of artists, artist groups, and critics linked by their aesthetic and theoretical responses to science, science fiction, and new media. Focuses on the Italian Spatial Artist Lucio Fontana and French Painter of Space Yves Klein.

On Lucio Fontana's little-known engagement with ceramics Given the sculptural properties of his famous slashed canvases, it is perhaps little wonder that Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) began his career as a sculptor. Less well-known is his work as a ceramicist, which commenced in the mid-1930s and produced an exploration of materiality that profoundly informed his practice as an artist. This interest was developed parallel to his painting and was, in many ways, indistinguishable from his work as a sculptor. As Fontana continued to create ceramics, he became increasingly obsessed with the concept of matter as it related to the mass and volume of the sculpted object. His exploration of the physicality and weight of a work of art prefigured his later desire to diminish the materiality of his art. As Fontana scholar Paolo Campiglio writes here, "he sought to discover a form that could exceed its own materiality. He sought to test the possibilities of space. He sought to create an object with absolute plasticity. And he sought to discover an ideal abstract form, opposed to the accepted, geometrical forms."

For the first time in the US, Lucio Fontana Ambienti Spaziali presents a substantial number of the spatial environments conceived by the artist between 1948 and 1968, works that can be regarded as forerunners of the environments created by figures such as Allan Kaprow and Robert Irwin and the light art of the likes of Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman. Six environments are included in the exhibition: Spatial Environment in Black Light, 1948-49, first shown at the Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, in 1949; the Neon Structure for the 9th Milan Triennale, 1951, created for the grand staircase of the Palazzo dellArte in Milan; Chandelier, 1959-60, executed for the Cinema Duse in Pesaro; Spatial Environment, 1967, realized for the exhibition Lo spazio dellimmagine in Foligno in 1967; Spatial Environment, 1967, mounted for the first time at the Galleria del Deposito, Genoa; and Spatial Environment at Documenta 4, Kassel, 1968. The environments are both the natural conclusion of his opening up of space through holes and cuts and the basic key to its understanding, not just in painting and sculpture, but in architecture too.

Catalogue for the major retrospective of this breakthrough Italian artist.

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, is the first large-scale historical survey in the United States dedicated to the German artist group Zero (1957-66). Founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, joined by Günther Uecker in 1961, the group expanded to include ZERO, an international network of like-minded artists who shared the group's aspiration to redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. Featuring more than thirty artists from nine countries, the catalogue explores the experimental practices developed by this extensive network of artists whose work anticipated aspects of Land art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. The publication is organized around points of intersection, exchange, and collaboration that defined these artists' shared history. Among the themes explored are the establishment of new definitions of painting; the introduction of movement and light as both formal and idea-based aspects of art; the use of space as subject and material; the interrogation of the relationship between nature, technology, and humankind; and the production of live actions or demonstrations. At once a snapshot of a specific group and a portrait of a generation, this title celebrates the pioneering nature of both the art and the transnational vision advanced by the ZERO network.