Lucio Fontana: Catalogue Raisonn

(Hardback)

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The catalogue raisonne of the work of Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) presents an historical and critical profile of the complete creative corpus of the artist "of the two worlds" at his highest expressive intensity and quality. This authoritative volume covers over four decades of Fontana's creative activity, which was characterized by an intuition of the intrinsic dynamism of the image of contemporary life through matter, light and space. Presented in chronological order, the volume ranges from the sculptures of 1926-1950 to the Ambienti, designed to be neither painting nor sculpture but "forms, colour, sound through spaces", and on to the Concetti spaziali, in which the problem of space is tackled through the perforation or slashing of the canvas. As a sculptor in the 1930s Fontana was a leading exponent of the new European generation of Expressionists, standing counterpoint to the "Novecento" movement. In the Forties and Fifties, as a sculptor but especially painter and creator of opere ambiente, he was the protagonist of "informal" Spatialism. He later became, in the Sixties, a point of reference for new pictorial and plastic expression. The editor Enrico Crispolti, who was a friend of the artist, has been researching Fontana's work since the late Fifties. Here he provides a rigorous examination of the documentation regarding Fontana's oeuvre - some 4,000 works - carried out in close collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation, making this the definitive publication on the artist and an essential and up-to-date instrument for scholars, collectors, museums, and art dealers interested in an in-depth understanding of Fontana's work.

Author Bio

Enrico Crispolti is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Siena. Art historian and militant art critic, he is the author of countless monographs and has edited the general catalogues of the work of Baj, Fontana and Guttuso.