CategoriesStyles and Movements
Spatialism
Lucio Fontana's postwar Italian movement, launched in 1947, which pierced and slashed the canvas to open art onto real space, light and time.
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About
Lucio Fontana, an Italian sculptor raised between Argentina and Milan, argued that artists should leave oil and marble behind for the realities of modern physics: space, time, light, motion, even television. Students in Buenos Aires set out these ideas in the Manifiesto Blanco (1946), and after his return to Milan in 1947 Fontana and a circle including Roberto Crippa and Gianni Dova issued a series of Spatialist manifestos.
Fontana's answer was to break the surface. From 1949 he punched holes through paper and canvas, and in 1958 he began slicing monochrome canvases with a blade, often backing the cuts with black gauze; almost all these works are titled Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept). He also lit a darkened room with ultraviolet light and hung a looping neon line at the 1951 Milan Triennale. Younger Italians such as Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi pushed canvases into relief.
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