A major exhibition on the sculpture of Lucio Fontana in New York, with more than 80 works

From November 3, 2022 to February 4, 2023, the sculpture of Lucio Fontana ( Rosario, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968) takes center stage in New York. In fact, the Hauser & Wirth gallery is presenting the second in a trilogy of exhibitions dedicated to Fontana, in collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation, and focusing on Fontana’s prolific discoveries and experiments specifically through sculpture. Significantly, the exhibition will be held at the gallery’s headquarters at 32 East 69th Street, the same address where, in 1961, dealers Martha Jackson and David Anderson presented Fontana’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

The exhibition, titled Lucio Fontana. Sculpture, follows Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles’ 2020 exhibition, Lucio Fontana. Walking the Space: Sp atial Environments , 1948 - 1968 (the first comprehensive presentation in the U.S. of Fontana’s spatial environments) and will be followed by a major anthological exhibition to be held at the gallery’s Hong Kong location. Lucio Fontana. Sculpture features more than 80 works on loan from major institutions and museums and aims to shed light on the revolutionary practices of an artist hardly exhibited outside Europe. Although Fontana is best known in the United States for his cuts, sculpture was an integral part of his artistic project and fundamental to his evolution. Having experimented with the medium from the beginning to the end of his career, Fontana took sculpture as an opportunity to experiment with and practice the exchange between form, color, material and space, through a dialectical relationship between abstract and figurative, spatial and baroque.

Writing about the wide range of artistic mediums Fontana mastered during his lifetime, esteemed art historian Enrico Crispolti posed the question, “What if he had only been a sculptor?” This exhibition at Hauser & Wirth just as provocatively answers that question by bringing together a series of three-dimensional works in terracotta, cement, ceramic, plaster, metal, glass and wood made over five decades, from the 1920s until the artist’s death in 1968, all in dialogue with paintings and drawings that provide a counterpoint to the gesturality and methodology of sculpture.

In homage to Fontana’s 1961 debut exhibitions in the United States, Lucio Fontana. Sculpture opens with a dazzling painting first presented in those exhibitions, Spatial Concept, The Moon in Venice (1961). This canvas, which defies categorization, will be juxtaposed with a rare core of drawings reflecting the artist’s impressions of his first visit to New York, where he was guided by the famous architect and collector Philip Johnson. The exhibition continues with the rarely exhibited sculpture, Nude (1926), and an exploration of pivotal works from the 1930s, including Graffiti Board (1931), Figure at the Window (1931), Abstract Sculpture (1934), Shells and Butterflies (1935-36) and Sea Horses (1936). Made during a period of intense research, these pivotal works embody a particular syncretism between the abstract and the figurative and demonstrate how Fontana’s work began to express pure innovation and how, unfolding in the broader context of European sculpture, his production was rooted in historical avant-garde movements, reinterpreting those movements as well.

These sculptures were a prelude to Fontana’s experiments in the late 1940s, which, in their association with the emergence of Spatialism, were characterized by both abstract and figurative explorations and were fundamental to the development of the artist’s distinctive new style. In this regard, the Spatial Sculpture (1947), a material circle imbued with a primordial force, stands in dialogue with figurative works such as the monumental Female Figure with Flowers (1948).

The second floor of the exhibition illustrates the tension generated between Fontana’s various Spatial Concepts (a title the artist began adopting in 1946 for all of his Spatialist works) and his figurative sculptures, created through his unique treatment of material and color. Visitors will experience a visual journey through Fontana’s extraordinary lifelong creativity, from Spatial Concept (1949), the first and rare linen papers perforated with “holes,” to the multiform terracotta sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s, mindful of Baroque art, such as the lively Battles or the stunning Harlequin (1948-49). The last floor of the exhibition is devoted to the evolution of Fontana’s sculptural experimentation between the late 1950s and 1960s. A grouping of works Spatial Concept, Nature, sculptures torn by “paths” that are highly representative of the artist’s research in this period, illustrate an existential statement of the artist’s spatial philosophy. The exhibition closes with the equally productive, though lesser known, period of the artist’s last years of life, a time when the boundaries between painting and sculpture were almost erased. The Ellipses (1967) and the metal sculptures described by critics as “space capsules” were executed mechanically and testify to the final phase of Fontana’s aesthetic investigations, in which the conceptual component becomes fundamental.

Lucio Fontana. Sculpture will be accompanied by a new, fully illustrated catalog from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, conceived by designer Leonardo Sonnoli and edited by leading Fontana scholar and scientific advisor to the Lucio Fontana Foundation, Luca Massimo Barbero. The volume, produced in collaboration with the Foundation, will be the first extensive English-language monograph devoted to Fontana’s sculptural works and includes a preface by Paolo Laurini and essays by art historians Cristina Beltrami and Maria Villa, as well as an essay by the curator. This project is part of the Lucio Fontana Foundation’s commitment to study and present Fontana’s sculptural production to new audiences, which will culminate in the November 2022 release of the catalog raisonné of ceramic sculptures (Skira) edited by Luca Massimo Barbero in collaboration with the Foundation.

Image: Lucio Fontana in Paris, Galerie Iris Clert, on November 10, 1961.

A major exhibition on the sculpture of Lucio Fontana in New York, with more than 80 works

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