Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold

This exhibition reexamines the career of Lucio Fontana (b. 1899, Rosario, Argentina; d. 1968, Varese, Italy), one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century. Featuring a wide selection of Fontana’s celebrated slashed paintings or Cuts (tagli) created in the last two decades of his production, the exhibition also presents extraordinary examples of other major bodies of work since the artist’s beginnings as a figurative sculptor. Alongside important works on canvas, Lucio Fontana. On the Threshold includes exquisitely crafted works in ceramic—a material Fontana used during his entire career—as well as his pioneering environments (ambienti). These visually immersive constructions powerfully contextualize Fontana’s radical search to integrate the space of art and the space of the viewer in one continuous field of experience.

Lucio Fontana made one of the most extraordinary, radical gestures in modern art when in 1958 he slashed the surface of a monochrome painting with a knife. A reassessment of Fontana’s legacy, this exhibition comprises approximately one hundred objects, including sculptures, ceramics, paintings, works on paper, and environments, all made between 1931 and 1968, and reconsiders the artist’s oeuvre between painting and sculpture, as part of a wider research on space and the materiality of the work of art.