MILAN.- On Tuesday 10 November 2026, Tornabuoni Art reopened its Milan gallery, enlarged and fully renovated, with the exhibition Lucio Fontana. "Che splendida giornata…", curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, which runs until 23 January 2027 and brings together thirty works by the artist.

The gallery at via Fatebenefratelli 36 is doubling its exhibition space: a deliberate strategic choice and a renewed vote of confidence in Milan.

This new chapter opens with Lucio Fontana, the artist who, more than any other, helped make Tornabuoni Art one of the leading international centres for contemporary art, and whose work remains deeply bound up with the gallery's history.

"In the early 2000s, the response to the globalisation of the art market was to open new venues around the world," say Ursula and Michele Casamonti. "Today we favour a different model: galleries plan exhibitions and projects, including abroad, from their own spaces, which become genuine centres of cultural production reaching far beyond their walls. That is why we chose to invest in Milan and to begin again, as always in our history, with Lucio Fontana."

This is not a conventional retrospective. Alongside Fontana's key cycles of paintings, the exhibition offers an original reflection on the reverse of his canvases, which the artist regarded as an integral part of his work.

The complexity and richness of Fontana's research will be conveyed through a striking installation centred on a Concetto spaziale, Attesa of 1968, on the back of which Fontana wrote by hand "Che splendida giornata dopo tanta burrasca" ("What a splendid day after such a storm"), the phrase that inspired the title of the exhibition.

Visitors will also be able to consider the hidden side of the works and discover a more intimate dimension of Fontana's practice. Behind the apparent simplicity of his celebrated slashed canvases lie traces of the creative process and of the artist's habit of jotting down phrases, thoughts and impressions on their reverse. These inscriptions bring a private, everyday note to works that have become icons of the twentieth century, turning them into the pages of a genuine diary.

Among the key moments of the exhibition is Concetto spaziale, Le Jour of 1962, one of the largest gold canvases Fontana made. Created in front of Belgian television cameras, the work will be shown alongside the film made on that occasion, the only known footage of Fontana piercing the canvas. The pairing will link the work directly to the gesture that produced it, making visible the physical and performative dimension of the artist's research.

The exhibition closes with Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio of 1963, from the series of large oval canvases, installed in a darkened room that invites visitors to enter, in the imagination, the cosmic space that runs through all of Fontana's research.