In Rome, Lucio Fontana's cuts and holes among masterpieces by Bernini and Caravaggio. The exhibition at the Borghese Gallery

Entitled Lucio Fontana. Earth and Gold the exhibition that the Galleria Borghese in Rome dedicates to the father of Spatialism. Curated by Anna Coliva, director of the Roman museum, the exhibition showcases a specific production of Lucio Fontana (Rosario, 1899 - Comabbio, 1968), the Spatial Concepts in Gold and the Ceramic Crucifixions. Twentieth-century art thus returns to the Gallery, and does so for the first time with an Italian artist after exhibitions devoted to Irish Bacon, Swiss Giacometti and Spanish Picasso. The exhibition, reads a note, “is part of the program of research that the museum has been conducting for years on its own exceptionality as a place, which is highly significant as a concentrated and combined identity of collection and space.”

In all, about forty works are on display, including oil paintings in gold and ceramics made mainly between 1958 and 1968. The exhibition intends to cover a precise function, that is, it intends to demonstrate to the public how the problems Lucio Fontana posed with his cuts, holes, and ceramics are placed in continuation with the questions of Renaissance and Baroque art: in particular, it intends to demonstrate the constant topicality of the problem of the relationship with space, its definition, and the search for its overcoming. In this path, gold acquires additional value, as a maximal and antinaturalistic abstraction and itself a spatial component that, as it was in antiquity (classical, early Christian, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque), becomes a synthesis of light and space.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an introductory text by Anna Coliva and critical essay by Germano Celant. It can be visited from May 22 to July 28, 2019 during the museum’s opening hours, that is, Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. The ticket for visiting the museum costs 18 euros (plus 2 reservation fee). Reduced, for 18-25 year olds, costs 7 euros (again with an additional 2 euros compulsory reservation), while the disabled and tour guides get in free (no reservation fee). Under-18s, students and teachers of Architecture, Humanities (archaeological or historical-artistic address), Conservation of Cultural Heritage and Educational Sciences, Academies of Fine Arts; MiBAC employees; ICOM members; journalists with order card; school groups with accompanying person, school teaching staff, tenured or with term contract, upon presentation of appropriate certificate issued by the educational institutions.

For all info, visit the official website of the Borghese Gallery.

Pictured: a view of the exhibition. Photo Credit Niccolò Ara © Lucio Fontana Foundation by SIAE 2019

In Rome, Lucio Fontana's cuts and holes among masterpieces by Bernini and Caravaggio. The exhibition at the Borghese Gallery

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