New Thinking About Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics

Edmund de Waal is an artist who writes. Much of his work is about the contingency of memory: bringing particular histories of loss and exile into renewed life. Both his artistic and written practice have broken new ground through their critical engagement with the history and potential of ceramics, as well as with architecture, music, dance and poetry. De Waal continually investigates themes of diaspora, memorial and materiality with his interventions and artworks made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide including The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The British Museum, London; The Frick Collection, New York; Museo Ebraico, Venice; Schindler House, Los Angeles; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and V&A Museum, London.

De Waal is also renowned for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), The White Road (2015), and Letters to Camondo (2021). His latest book an Archive (2025), published with Ivorypress, is an archival gathering together of texts that reflect on both his own family archives and the archives of the writers, artists, and spaces that he has spent years inhabiting.

He was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction by Yale University in 2015. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. In 2023 he received the Isamu Noguchi Award. In 2024 he was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. b.1964 Nottingham. He lives and works in London.

Raffaele Bedarida teaches Contemporary Art History at the Sapienza University of Rome. After studying at the University of Siena, he obtained his doctorate from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was an Associate Professor at Cooper Union, New York. His research focuses on cultural diplomacy, migration, and artistic exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also investigated the history of exhibitions, censorship, and propaganda during the Italian Fascist era and the Cold War. He has been the recipient of several international fellowships, including from the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Italian Council, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His publications include Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l'esilio, l'America (2018); Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera (2022); and Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, co-curated with Sharon Hecker (2022). He is currently curating a catalogue raisonné of the work of Francesco Di Cocco, in collaboration with the Archivio Enrico Crispolti, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s National Editions.

Luca Bochicchio teaches Contemporary Art History at the University of Verona. He is the scientific director of Fondazione Museo della Ceramica di Savona, and an international collaborating professor at the Autonomous University of Chile. Since 2013 he has contributed to the development of the Museo Diffuso Albisola (MuDa), comprising Casa Museo Jorn, which he directs alongside the recently established Centro Studi. His research explores twentieth-century art, including Futurism, sculpture, ceramic, Nuclear Art, the Imaginist Bauhaus, Post Human Art, as well as international contemporary art. He also focuses on museology as applied to modern and contemporary cultural heritage through audience development, communication, and conservation.
He was awarded the U.S. Travel Grant from the Terra Foundation of American Art and was a visiting researcher at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; the the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris; and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. He has collaborated on several curatorial projects for institutions and museums, including Museum Jorn, Silkeborg; Cobra Museum, Amstelveen; Musée d'art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva; Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich and New York; M9 Museo del ‘900, Venice; Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero, Rovereto; Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan; Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan; Archivio Baj, Vergiate. He is the author of several artist monographs, including Scultura e memoria. Leoncillo, i caduti e i sopravvissuti (2016), Lucio Fontana. Lettere a Tullio d’Albisola 1936-1964 (2023), Enrico Baj. Catalogo generale delle opere in ceramica (2024), and Unica dimensione. La Linea di Piero Manzoni (2025).

Elena Dellapiana is Professor of History of Architecture and Design at the Department of Architecture & Design of Turin Polytechnic University. Her research explores the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, cities, and design, the training of designers and architects, and the relationship between the applied arts and the “system of the arts.” She has published several papers and books on the history of design. She was the co-director (with G. Bonsoni and J. Shnapp) of the AIS/design Journal, published by the Associazione Italiana Storici del Design; the founder and coordinator of the Centro Studi per la Storia del Design in Piemonte, and director of Torino Urban Lab. Her publications include contributions to Storia dell’Architettura Italiana. L’Ottocento, edited by A. Restucci (2005), Made in Italy. Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, edited by K. Fallan e G. Lees Maffey (2013), and monographs Il design della ceramica in Italia 1850-2000 (2010), Il design degli architetti in Italia 1920-2000, with F. Bulegato (2014), and Una storia dell’architettura contemporanea, with G. Montanari (2015-2021). She edited Museographie. Musei in Europa negli anni tra le due guerre, with M. B. Failla and F. Varallo (2020) e Bruno Zevi. History, Criticism and Architecture after WWI, with M. Cassani Simonetti (2021). Her latest books include Il design e l’invenzione del Made in Italy (2022), and Il design di Emilio Ambasz. La pratica dell’invenzione (2026).  

Paolo Scrivano is Associate Professor of Architectural History at Milan Polytechnic University. Since receiving his PhD from Turin Polytechnic University, he has taught at the University of Toronto, Boston University, and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and has received research funds from the Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Boston University’s Humanities Foundation, and the Australian Research Council. He has authored several publications on twentieth-century architecture, including the volumes Storia di un’idea di architettura moderna. Henry-Russell Hitchcock e l’International Style (2001), Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea, with P. Bonifazio (2001), and Building Transatlantic Italy: Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America (2013).

Yasuko Tsuchikane is an Adjunct Professor in Art History at Cooper Union, New York, and Waseda University, Tokyo. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Gakushu-in University, Tokyo, and a PhD in Art History from Columbia University, New York. Her research focuses on twentieth-century premodern and modern visual and material cultures of Japan and Asia at large to articulate their intellectual, socio-political and ideo-religious positions against the changing domestic and global environments. She was a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK, in 2015 and 2016; a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in 2021, and an Anne van Biema Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C. in 2022. Selected publications include: “Picasso as Other: Koyama Fujio and Polemics of Postwar Japanese Ceramics,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 26 (2014); “Rescuing Temples and Empowering Art: Naiki Jinzaburō and the Rise of Civic Initiatives in Meiji Kyoto,” in Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention (2016); and “Defining Modernity in Japanese Sculpture: Two Waves of Italian Impact on Casting Techniques” in Finding Lost Wax: the Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso, edited by S. Hecker (2020). She is currently working on a publication on the series of representational and nonfigurative murals for Buddhist temple architectures by twentieth-century Japanese artist Dōmoto Inshō, as well as an exhibition project in New York on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese female artist Shinoda Tōkō, active in New York and Japan creating calligraphy and abstract, monochromatic paintings.