A major solo exhibition of Lucio Fontana, known for his slashed canvases, opens in Hong Kong next month

These Japanese artists were also intrigued by Fontana’s perforation of sculptures and canvases. This mutual fascination culminated in Fontana’s work being prominently exhibited in Japan at the Gutai Pinacotheca art space in Osaka in the early 1960s, alongside gutai art.

Fontana would also go on to support Japanese avant-garde artists in Europe, including the prolific Kusama, whom he met at the 1965 Nul 65 exhibition in Amsterdam and whose famous Narcissus Garden installation at the Venice Biennale he would fund, together with gallerist Renato Cardazzo, a year later.

The curation of each of the three Hauser exhibitions has a specific focus. The New York show at 32 East 69th Street—the site of the former Martha Jackson Gallery where, in 1961, Fontana presented his first solo show in the US—spotlighted his sculptural experiments from the 1920s to late ’60s: ceramic sculptures, as well as paintings, and works in plaster, concrete and glass. The exhibition was a reminder that, long before he was slashing canvases, the Argentina-born, Milan-raised artist was already a forward-thinking figure in the conservative western art world.

In case you missed it: ‘Pisstanks’, sh*t and murky waters: performance artist Florentina Holzinger spotlights overtourism and challenges the line between high and low-brow art at the Venice Biennale

His exploratory approach to sculpture was a combination of a variety of influences. At the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, he studied under the influential sculptor Adolfo Wildt, who encouraged Fontana to trust in the academic teachings, but also to try new ideas. This approach led to his early works in clay, terracotta and metal, which embody a radical blending of the abstract and the figurative.

He was also shaped by his father, a fellow sculptor, whose workshop in Argentina produced decorative funerary monuments, and for whom Fontana spent some time working. With a grounding in the traditional techniques learnt from his father and teacher, he was motivated to reinterpret historical avant-garde movements, such as cubism, futurism and surrealism, in his own work.

In the 1930s, he spent some time collaborating with architects on various buildings, which made him realise that “sculptures were not just ornaments that occupy space but a kind of device that actively shapes and is in dialogue with the surrounding physical space”, as Maria Villa, vice-president of Fondazione Lucio Fontana, explains.

He would further explore this idea of the relationship between art and space in the late 1940s, when the world became obsessed with the space race, as we advancements in nuclear and theoretical physics. Not only was Fontana deeply fascinated by early aerospace breakthroughs, he also believed that art needed to evolve alongside modern scientific discoveries. In 1946, he famously published Manifiesto Blanco (“White Manifesto”), in which he rejected traditional forms and advocated for a new art that integrated matter, colour, sound and movement in time and space.

This paved the way for the first works in his famous Buchi series in 1949, which he would continue to create throughout his career. These were canvases, and clay and ceramic sculptures which he pierced to expose, philosophically, the infinite space and cosmic dimension that lay beyond the holes made in the surface. In 1959, he began his famous Natura (“Nature”) series, which consists of distorted spheres made of terracotta and bronze, gashed and pierced with holes to convey the sense of their being unstable and alive.

“Post-war western artists were proposing that a painting was not just a window or an image [that replicates reality], but [rather that] the image should eventually be constructed by the artist through the matter he was using,” Barbero says. “Fontana was going beyond the [traditional] idea of painting by piercing the canvas and ceramics with holes, so that [the pieces] lose their [illustrative or representative] function.

“The gesture was very important: instead of violently destroying something—many would misinterpret his act as such—he was actually adding space to a two-dimensional surface. The idea was that he was using his hand to change the matter—which could be paper, clay, metal, oil, acrylic, canvas or wood—and thinking about what a gesture of his hand and tools would do to it.”

Fontana’s choices weren’t limited to tangible materials; he was also interested in light. The 2020 Los Angeles show reconstructed his Ambienti Spaziali (“Spatial Environments”) pieces, created from the 1940s to ’60s, which consist of labyrinthine corridors and dark rooms decorated with neon tubes and black lights. He used these industrial materials to pioneer his spatialism movement, which aimed to transcend the traditional, flat limitations of canvas and sculpture. Ambienti Spaziali was one of the earliest examples of installation art, predating works by conceptual art giants such as Turrell and Bruce Nauman; he placed the viewer within the artwork and shifted its purpose from a static object to an experience, albeit an ephemeral one.

“Los Angeles was home to the Light and Space Movement,” says Barbero, referring to the 1960s and 1970s phenomenon in southern California which saw artists use light instead of paint as a medium, a practice inspired by the region’s summery climate and postwar aerospace technology. “But this 2020 Fontana exhibition [highlighted that] the Argentine artist was already using Wood’s light [UV light] … in 1949 and neon light in 1951. The US audience rediscovered how pioneering Fontana was.”

Meanwhile, there is another element to the Hong Kong exhibition: it will also showcase incredibly rare works from the 1950s known as the Inchiostri (“Ink”) series—light, thin canvases applied with delicate ink washes that resemble distant, abstract landscapes or mountains, or perhaps a cosmic fog. It is against these ethereal surfaces that some of the earliest slashes, created in the process of the Tagli, appeared.

Straight cuts allowed him to create calculated, elegant and visceral gateways into the infinite void, often mended on the reverse with black gauze to create the illusion of darkness. Compared to early Buchi pieces, which were often spontaneous or rhythmic clusters, the Tagli provided a cleaner, more deliberate and structured method of delineating light and shadow across monochromatic surfaces. Far from being a casual, aggressive strike, though, the gesture was deeply meditative. After saturating the stretched canvas with vivid, single-colour ink, he would often wait—sometimes for hours or even weeks—before making a single, decisive cut with a knife. This also explains the title of the majority of these pieces: Attese, or “Expectations”.

Barbero says that, while Fontana was never directly influenced by Chinese methods, he sees a common thread between his slash paintings and Chinese ink art. “Fontana’s Slashes are more conceptual, philosophical and slower as a gesture when compared to his Buchi pieces. They have a lot [in common] with the idea of the spirit and gestures in the eastern culture,” he says, referring to Chinese calligraphy, in which brushstrokes are reflective of the artist’s emotions. “When you look at an old Chinese or Japanese painting, you don’t see the painting as something just to hang [as decoration]; you recognise the rhythm in which a tree or a mountain is done, or how there is a meditative poem to pair with the spiritual landscape. That’s why we have Fontana’s ink paintings at the Hong Kong show—to demonstrate the two cultures’ connection in the idea of the spirit and the gesture in art creation.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new book about Fontana’s oeuvre and life, published in simplified Chinese by Hauser & Wirth. There is also, Villa says, a third volume of a research series on Fontana, scheduled for publication next year, which will be dedicated to further exploring the relationship between the artist and Japan.

Decades after his death, Fontana’s influence continues to prove to subsequent generations that art isn’t, as Barbero puts it, “always about creating images but thoughts—that’s why he had always been an evergreen thinker”. “Fontana will remain one of the biggest [cultural leaders] in contemporary art,” he says.

“Think about all the new artists working on the environment, the monochrome and the conceptual [areas that Fontana had experimented with]. Fontana was important for Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, the 1950s generation, the Boomers—and [today’s] generation.” And while some might have found the artist too provocative during his lifetime, Barbero says, “The ‘Fontana Revolution’ was a good revolution. Maybe it was a little bit too bright for his time—but now we see the light.”

NOW READ

Frieze Seoul in 48 hours: fair director Patrick Lee’s insider guide to Korean art week

How a 700-year-old Southern Song dynasty village in Guangzhou was turned into the arts centre Chun Yang Tai

Korean ballet show ‘Gat’ brings traditional Joseon heritage to Hong Kong this September