Lucio Fontana life, paintings and art work

Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. Born in (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera. He was the son of the sculptor Luigi Fontana. Until 1922, he was working as a sculptor along withq his father, and then on his own. Hes participated in the first exhibition of Nexus Already in 1926, a group of young Argentine artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé.

He presented his first exhibition in 1930 under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt, organized by the Milano art gallery Il Milione. He then journeyed to Italy and France, working with abstract and expressionist painters during the following decade. He joined the association Abstraction-Création in Paris in 1935. In 1939, he joined the Corrente, a Milan group of expressionist artists.

The Altamira academy was founded by him together with some of his students n Buenos Aires (1946). and made public the White Manifesto. the Allied bombings of Milan destroyed his studio and works completely but soon also resumed his ceramics works in Albisola. He then collaborated with noted Milanese architects in Milan to decorate several new buildings that were part of the effort to reconstruct the city after the war.

In 1948 Fontana returned to Italy and exhibited his first Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Environment) at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. He then started the so-called Spatial Concept or slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the surface of monochrome paintings, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age". The generic title Concetto spaziale was devised by him for these works and used it for almost all his later paintings.

There were many collaborative projects Fotana got engaged with especially the most important architects of the day. Luciano Baldessari was the one who shared and supported his research for Spatial Light – Structure in Neon (1951) at the 9th Triennale. Apart from that, in 1953, he commissioned him to design the ceiling of the cinema in the Sidercomit Pavilion at the 21st Milan Fair.

Around 1960 his highly personal style was characterised up to that point, he covered canvases with layers of thick oil paint applied by hand and brush and using a scalpel or Stanley knife to create great fissures in their surface.

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