MILAN.- Lucio Fontana. Origins and Imagination is now available online. Bringing together the reflections and research of twenty international scholars and art historians, the volume offers new perspectives on the artistic journey of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

This publishing initiative, produced by Fondazione Lucio Fontana and the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, follows the major conference held on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in December 2024, organized with the support of Intesa SanPaolo.

Artdaily Recommended · Paid Link

Lucio Fontana: Walking the Space

Spatial Environments, 1948–1968

Explore Lucio Fontana’s radical spatial environments and his groundbreaking vision of art, space, light, and perception.

See it on Amazon →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The volume, edited by Silvia Ardemagni, Luca Massimo Barbero, and Maria Villa, is available on the websites of the two foundations—www.fondazioneluciofontana.it and www.cini.it —in a bilingual edition (Italian and English) in open access, ensuring the widest possible access for students and researchers, as well as reaching professionals, collectors, and art enthusiasts worldwide. The digital publication will be followed by a printed edition.

From the early years in Argentina to the exhibitions that consolidated his international success, the essays trace the artist’s entire creative career, offering an updated synthesis of studies that highlights his contemporary relevance and his enduring ability to question the present, while opening up new research perspectives.

Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History: "Scholars from different generations were invited not for the purpose of composing an inventory, but rather in order to design, with a plurality of voices, a legible map of the artist’s work and reception, from the years he spent in the Rio de la Plata region to the manifestation of the myth in exhibition form”.

Silvia Ardemagni and Maria Villa, President and Vice-President of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana: “We have clearly proceeded by emblems, [...] selecting instead moments and themes that would allow for the reassessment of the chronologies and geographic realms in which the artist worked. The result of this is a set of different paths whose direction it is still possible to determine today”.





The volume

The volume opens with a series of essays aimed at exploring the intellectual and visual horizons that shaped Fontana’s avant-garde imagination. Ester Coen revisits the Futurist roots of the artist’s thought; Nico Stringa examines the relationship between Arturo Martini’s practice and Fontana’s sculptural production; Francesco Tedeschi retraces the notion of “creative abstraction” through the projects and sculptures of the 1930s; Valerio Terraroli offers a new reading of Italian ceramics between the 1930s and 1940s; finally, Giovanni Bianchi reconstructs the relationship between Mario Deluigi and the author of the Concetti spaziali highlighting the different sensibilities that coexisted within the Spatialist movement.

A second perspective focuses on the “Fontanian places” that lie between artistic biography and cultural geography: his debut between Rosario and Milan (Daniela Alejandra Sbaraglia) and the emergence of a “new sensibility” in Argentine art (Lorena Mouguelar). The volume proceeds with the experience of the Albisola kiln (Luca Bochicchio), Fontana’s participation in the Venice Biennals (Sileno Salvagnini), and his connections with Turin’s cultural milieu during the 1960s (Giorgina Bertolino).

Considerable attention is devoted to Fontana’s international critical reception during the 1950s and 1960s. Paolo Campiglio examines the role of the intermediary Charles Damiano in shaping exchanges between England and the United States; Silvia Bignami reassesses the Parisian “cold shower” through exhibition and critical discourse; Stefano Turina traces the artist’s presence in Japan, still largely underexplored.

The final section of the volume turns to exhibitions history through a selection of case studies in which curatorial strategies themselves become forms of critical interpretation. Beginning with Omaggio a Fontana, Luca Pietro Nicoletti reflects on Enrico Crispolti’s reading of the artist’s work; Francesco Guzzetti revisits the landmark 1966 exhibition at the Walker Art Center; Choghakate Kazarian offers insights from the making of a major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Marina Pugliese discusses the rationale behind Ambienti/Environments, held at Pirelli HangarBicocca (2017-2018); and Cristina Beltrami re-examines Lucio Fontana: Sculpture, the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to Fontana’s sculptural practice.

To convey the complexity and vitality of Fontana’s oeuvre, the volume also includes a contribution focused on materiality, with Barbara Ferriani’s analysis of artistic practices, techniques, and conservation issues, as well as a reflection by the contemporary artist Gianni Caravaggio, who proposes the Spatial Concept as a “device for performing prime images.”