Lucio Fontana
The artist of the slash.
Lucio Fontana slashed the canvas and opened painting up to space. He called it Spatialism.
Lucio Fontana was born in 1899 in Rosario, Argentina. His father was an Italian sculptor, and Lucio spent much of his childhood in Milan. He was wounded in the First World War and then studied sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan. In the 1930s he worked in both abstract sculpture and colourful, expressive ceramics.
During the Second World War he lived in Argentina. There, in 1946, together with his students, he drew up the White Manifesto, which called for a new art for an age of science, movement and technology. When he returned to Milan in 1947, he founded Spatialism, the art of space. He wanted to break out of the flat surface of the painting and work with real space, light and time.
From 1949 he began to pierce holes in the canvas, and from 1958 he slashed it with a knife. The canvas was often painted in a single colour, and behind the slashes was black fabric that gave depth. He called the works Concetto spaziale, spatial concept, and the slash series was given the additional title Attese, expectations. The holes and slashes are not destruction but an opening onto the infinite. He also made early light installations, including ones with neon tubes and black light.
Fontana died in 1968. He became an important forerunner of many movements of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the German Zero group, and of installation art and conceptual art. His slashed canvases have become one of the best-known and most debated features of post-war art.