NOIRE

The Italian artist Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario di Santa Fé in Argentina in 1899. He attendes the Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo in Milan as of 1914. He serves in World War I in 1917, however, he is dismissed as early as in 1918, because of an injury, so that he can complete his engineering studies. He studies sculpting at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1920, but soon follows his family back to Argentina in 1922, where he works in his father’s sculpting studio. He has his own studio in Rosario di Santa Fé as of 1924. In 1928 he goes to Milan again and studies at the Accademia di Brera.
Besides figurative sculptures, he also makes terracotta reliefs and painted gypsum plates as of around 1930. In 1934 he and Fausto Melotti, Atanasio Soldati, Mauro Reggiani join the Paris artists group “Abstraction-Création”. They set up a manifesto on abstract art in 1935, Fontana’s first one-man show with abstract works takes place the same year in the Milan Galleria del Milione.
Lucio Fontana lives again in Argentina as of 1939, where he founds the private academy Altamira in 1947, he and his students at the academy compose the “Manifiesto Blanco” (white manifesto), demanding the synthesis of artistic genres and the renunciation of traditional materials. Back in Milan in 1947, he founds the “Movimento spaziale” and writes the “Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo”, demanding a new form of space-oriented art. He composes the second manifesto of the Spazialismo the same year, followed by the third in 1950 and the fourth in 1951.
He executes the first perforated canvasses in 1949, they all carry the title “Concetto spaziale” (Space Concept).
Lucio Fontana belongs to the most important and most influential Italian artists, he dies in Comabbio near Varese on July 7, 1968.