LONDON.- This March, seven works from an exceptional German private collection will headline Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in London. Treasured within the same private collection for six decades, the group brings together seminal works by Lucio Fontana, alongside key pieces by Alberto Giacometti and Sam Francis. Together, the works carry a combined estimate in the region of £15 million.

Although assembled in Germany, the collection is, at its core, profoundly Italian - anchored by the vision of Lucio Fontana, whose intellectual audacity and formal innovations reshaped the trajectory of post-war art. Few artists of his generation saw their ideas travel so widely, or imprint themselves so forcefully, across both European and international avant-gardes.

Comprising five works by Fontana, the collection represents the most extensive and nuanced survey of Fontana’s work to appear on the market in recent memory. Seen together for the first time, the works reveal the full breadth of his experimentation during his most revolutionary years: from early punctures that questioned the confines of the picture plane, to the dramatic cuts that transformed gesture into three dimensional space, to sculptural interventions that tested the limits of matter itself. Their coexistence within a single private collection speaks to the exceptional prescience of collectors who recognised, ahead of their time, the radical nature of his vision.

“To encounter five works of this calibre - spanning every major chapter of Fontana’s practice - within a single collection is extraordinarily rare. Each piece marks a different breakthrough in his lifelong investigation of space and gesture, but together they form the most complete portrait of an artist who redefined the possibilities of art in the post war world. Collections like this will hardly resurface again. What makes the group even more compelling is the way the Fontanas sit alongside the Giacometti and the Francis: three artists working across different languages, yet united by a shared drive to rethink form, perception, and the experience of the viewer. The fact that the collection has remained unseen for decades, and is now coming to Italy before its sale, makes this a truly exceptional moment for collectors and for the wider history of post-war European art.” --Claudia Dwek, Chairman of Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s

“Fontana’s presence in Germany at the turn of the 1960s was catalytic, offering artists a new way of thinking about space, material and physical encounter. This collection traces the moment his ideas entered the German avant-garde at a formative moment, directly shaping the ZERO movement and the broader reorientation of post-war artistic language. And all this happened through figures including Alfred Schmela, who provided a platform where European and American artists could inform one another. To see this group resurface today is to glimpse a crucial chapter of European art history as it was first written, even before its significance was fully understood.” -- Lisa Stevenson, International Specialist, Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s London

The collection sheds new light on Italy’s pivotal, yet often under-acknowledged, role in shaping the post-war avant-garde beyond its borders. The majority of the works were originally acquired through Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, one of the most important avant-garde galleries of the period and a crucible for artistic exchange. Founded in 1957 by Alfred Schmela - a charismatic and uncompromising presence in the Düsseldorf scene - the gallery quickly became a beacon for avant-garde experimentation. Its inaugural exhibitions in 1957 included a then-unknown, 29-year-old Yves Klein, whose monochromes famously provoked bewilderment and even hostility, etched onto the gallery’s windows by passersby.

Schmela’s programme expanded with exceptional speed, hosting the first European solo exhibitions of Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland, Robert Indiana, George Segal and Richard Tuttle, among others. Within this fertile environment, Schmela quickly perceived in Fontana a visionary capable of dismantling the very grammar of painting. Their collaboration, forged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rested on intellectual affinity and a shared embrace of risk-taking.

This culminated in Fontana’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Schmela in January 1960 - a turning point that introduced German audiences to his radical redefinition of space, surface and gesture. For the young artists who would become central to the ZERO movement, including Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, Schmela offered a platform to encounter Fontana’s ideas firsthand at a key moment in the formation of their own practices. The gallery even employed Joseph Beuys as an assistant, pointing to the unusual porosity and experimental freedom that defined its programme.

Through Schmela, Italian radicalism travelled northwards, laying part of the groundwork for Germany’s post-war avant-garde. Fontana’s influence would then resonate far beyond Europe, informing the work of artists such as Yves Klein, Anish Kapoor, Robert Irwin, Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell - each extending, in their own language, the spatial and perceptual possibilities Fontana opened.

A look at the collection:

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1960 (est. £8.5 - 12m)

A rare, monumental canvas from Fontana’s revolutionary Olii series, punctured by constellations of green-rimmed buchi.

Extending nearly two metres in both dimensions, the work immerses the viewer in a cosmic void and anticipates the material ambition of La Fine di Dio, ranking among the most ambitious canvases of the artist’s career.

Lucio Fontana, Teatrino, 1964 (est. £350,000 - 450,000)

A key work from Fontana’s Teatrini series, in which the canvas becomes a staged object between painting, sculpture, and design. The lacquered, curving frame introduces a Pop inflection - its lips-like silhouette framing an arc of buchi that open the surface to infinite space - revealing Fontana’s interest in contemporary form, objecthood, and visual culture.

Lucio Fontana, Natura, 1959-60 (est. £1.2 - 1.8m)

A powerful example from Fontana’s celebrated Natura series, in which raw matter is pressed, fractured, and reshaped by hand. Conceived at the height of the space race, the work reflects Fontana’s fascination with cosmic forces and the material consequences of expansion, impact, and void.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1960 (est. £1.5 - 2m)

The work is a quintessential example of Fontana’s tagli, in which a single, clean vertical cut transforms raw canvas into a threshold of real space. Rejecting illusion in favour of physical and conceptual immediacy, the work distils his radical vision into one decisive gesture, fusing restraint and rupture, matter and void, and announcing a fully mature language that redefined the possibilities of painting.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1955 (est. £700,000 - 1m)

A rare variation from Fontana’s Pietre series of the mid-1950s, incorporating Murano glass fragments embedded directly into the surface. The reflective stones activate light and texture, extending Fontana’s spatial investigations beyond the canvas and further destabilising the boundaries of the pictorial field.

Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout (conceived in 1960 and cast in 1964) (est. £2.2 - 2.8m)

His iconic standing figure, emblematic of his search for a new sculptural language through an intense exploration of matter, scale, and presence

Sam Francis, Untitled, 1962 (est. £600,000 - 800,000)

A key work from Sam Francis’s celebrated White Paintings, the series that launched his international reputation. Created in Paris, the canvas uses luminous white space and delicate tonal washes to evoke light, atmosphere, and openness, marking a breakthrough moment in Francis’s development as one of the great colourists of the post-war period.