Lucio Fontana was born February 19, 1899, in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina. His father was Italian and his mother Argentine. Fontana lived in Milan from 1905 to 1921 before moving back to Argentina, where he worked as a sculptor in his brother's studio. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition organized by Nexus, a group of young Argentine artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé. Upon his return to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, which he attended for two years. The Galleria Il Milione, Milan, organized Fontana’s first solo exhibition in 1930.

The artist traveled to Paris in 1935 and joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy, and later at the Sèvres factory, near Paris. In 1939, he joined Corrente, a group of Milanese expressionist artists. In 1940, Fontana moved to Buenos Aires. In 1946, together with some of his students, he founded the Academia de Altamira and published the Manifiesto Blanco. He moved back to Milan in 1947 and in collaboration with a group of writers and philosophers signed the Primo manifesto dello Spazialismo. He subsequently resumed his ceramic work in Albisola to explore these new ideas with his Concetti spaziali (1949–60).

The year 1949 marked a turning point in Fontana’s career. He created the Buchi, his first series of paintings featuring punctured canvases, as well as his first spatial environment, a combination of shapeless sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and blacklights to be viewed in a dark room. The latter work soon led him to employ neon tubing in ceiling decoration. In the early 1950s, he participated in Italian Art Informel exhibitions. During this decade, he experimented with various effects, such as slashing and perforating, in both painting and sculpture. The artist visited New York in 1961 during a show of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1966, he designed opera sets and costumes for La Scala, Milan. In the last years of his career, Fontana became increasingly involved in the staging of his work in the many exhibitions that honored him worldwide, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his last white canvases. These concerns were prominent at the 1966 Venice Biennale, for which he designed the environment for his works, and at the 1968 Documenta in Kassel. Fontana died on September 7, 1968, in Comabbio, Italy.


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