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The catalogue raisonné of the work of Italian painter and sculptor presents an historical profile of the complete creative corpus of the artist

In collaboration with Nini Ardemagni Laurini and Valeria Ernesti.

 

Organized chronologically and subdivided into categories of the extremely broad creative oeuvre of Lucio Fontana (Rosario de Santa Fé, 1899-Varese, 1968), one of the leading exponents of the international artistic avant-garde of the 20th century, this general annotated catalogue of sculpture, painting and “Ambientazioni” presents a rigorous historical and critical profile of the creative corpus of the artist “of the two worlds” at his highest expressive intensity and quality.
As a sculptor in the 1930s he was an important exponent of a new European generation of Expressionists, standing counterpoint to the “Novecento” movement. In the Forties and Fifties, as a sculptor but especially painter and author of “Ambientazioni”, he was a protagonist of “informal” Spatialism. He later became, in the Sixties, a point of reference for the new pictorial and plastic expression. The culmination of the archiving and authenticity documentation work of the Lucio Fontana Foundation, the “annotated catalogue” covers over four decades of creative activity characterized above all by an intuition of the intrinsic dynamism of the image of contemporary life through matter, light and space. The volume ranges from sculpture to its relation with architectural space, and from “spatial environments” to paintings dimensionally revolutionized by Fontana through the addition of material elements and especially by his use of “holes” and later “slashes” to penetrate the surface, in his continuously inventive search for “an art for the space age”.

Compiled in close collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation, the volume represents the most complete catalogue of Fontana’s works, derived through a painstaking review of current bibliographical and expository sources. The authority and experience of the editor, Enrico Crispolti, friend of the master and scholar of his work since the late Fifties, and the rigorous examination of the available documentation (regarding some 4,000 works), make the “annotated catalogue” an essential and up-to-date instrument for scholars, collectors, museums, and art dealers interested in an in-depth understanding of Fontana’s work.

 

Enrico Crispolti (Rome 1933) is Professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Siena, where he has directed for almost twenty years the School of Specialization in Art History. Historian of 19th and 20th century art and militant art critic, Crispolti is the author of countless monographs and, in addition to the general catalogue of Fontana, he has edited the general catalogues of the work of Baj and Guttuso. He has been organizing major Italian and European exhibitions in museums and exhibition centers since the early Sixties, dealing in particular with Futurism, artistic expression between the two world wars, the Informal, Pop Art, Nuova Figurazione, Environmental Art, the components of the contemporary art system and in particular contemporary art history and art criticism teaching methodology.