Milan 20122
Italy
The Fondazione Lucio Fontana is pleased to announce the release of the first two titles in the Electa Pesci rossi series: Lucio Fontana. Patron, Collector, Militant by Gaspare Luigi Marcone and Lucio Fontana in Argentina. From the early years to the Manifiesto Blanco by Daniela Alejandra Sbaraglia.
A special series of publications (text Italian/English), curated by the Artistic Committee of the Foundation (Silvia Ardemagni, Luca Massimo Barbero, Maria Villa) aimed at promoting new studies and lesser-known aspects of the artist’s career. Different yet complementary, both volumes contribute to the goal the Foundation set for this editorial project with Electa: to emphasize the vitality and contemporary relevance of Fontana by creating a platform for new in-depth studies, carefully aligned with the Foundation’s broader mission.
Lucio Fontana in Argentina. From the early years to the Manifiesto Blanco by Daniela Alejandra Sbaraglia analyses the two decades of his career in Argentina, his birthplace. This period, long neglected or considered marginal in his development, has been the subject of new studies thanks to recent insights and discoveries that have broadened our understanding of it and enabled us to reconsider its value.
Fontana discovered his vocation for the visual arts in the 1920s, training in his father’s sculpture studio and engaging in his first formal experiments. In an artistic context pervaded by tensions between tradition and innovation, he came into contact with a group of intellectuals in Rosario, including the painter Julio Vanzo, the critic Juan Zocchi and the poet Fausto Hernandez. With them he developed the “new sensibility” through exhibitions, publications and lectures, such as the one that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti delivered in Rosario in 1926.
In the 1930s, while living in Italy, he maintained active ties with Argentina, taking part in competitions and exhibitions, including those devoted to Argentine artists in Italy and Italian artists in Buenos Aires (1936 and 1938).
Finally, in the 1940s, spent between Rosario and Buenos Aires, he established himself as one of the most important artists in the country, winning national awards and extending his research into form, colour and space. During the decade he engaged continuously in experiments into sculpture, seeking new developments in ceramics and devising innovative “baroque” gestures imprinted in plaster, as well as drawings with avant-garde lines (his first “conceptos espaciales”), as well as sculptures of an ephemeral or architectural nature. In contact with his students and stimulated by the avant-gardes Arte Concreto and Madí, he developed the theories that would inspire the Manifiesto Blanco (1946), the founding act of Spazialismo.
Lucio Fontana. Patron, Collector, Militant by Gaspare Luigi Marcone focuses on his aesthetic-conceptual choices, exploring the role he played as a financial and critical supporter as well as a patron of certain developments and key figures in 20th-century art.
The complex and synchronic study begins symbolically with the exhibition 18 opere della collezione privata di Lucio Fontana / 18 opere della collezione privata di Bruno Munari, held at the Galleria Blu in Milan in May 1957. On this occasion, among the works collected by Fontana, there already appear artists destined to become significant figures in art history, such as Alberto Burri, Enrico Baj, Yves Klein, Osvaldo Licini and Emilio Scanavino. His interest in experimental artists also characterised the following years. In 1959 he bought one of the first Linee (1959) by Piero Manzoni and in 1965 the sculpture Tondo e Rettangolo (1964) by Luciano Fabro from his first solo exhibition. He also expressed his support through critical texts, statements and participation in publications and exhibition projects. In the last decade of his life, he was recognised as a sort of “spiritual and conceptual father” by the new generations of artists, in both Italy and abroad, including Gruppo T in Italy and Zero in Germany. His influence grew together with the establishment of his presence in the leading contemporary art venues, from the Venice Biennale to Documenta in Kassel, and European and international museums.
