Lucio Fontana

Introduction

With a selection of thirty works, on March 5, 1977 Galleria dello Scudo opened an exhibition dedicated to Lucio Fontana, founder of Spatialism, the avant-garde movement that contributed to the renewal of art not only in Italy in the second half of the 20th century.

Organized thanks to the collaboration of Teresa Fontana and the contribution of private collectors, the overview covered a period of time between 1958, the year of one of the first "cuts" proposed for the occasion, including the inscriptions "I am a saint" (in blue on the front) and "I’m a bastard" (in red on the back), and the ’60s. We note the presence of a spatial concept with holes and stones of 1959 belonged to the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, then canvases with slits and sequins, as well as large-format “Teatrini” of 1965-1966, chosen to mark a path accompanied by numerous drawings, partly before 1950, in part of the early 1960s, in which the artist ranges between spatialism and baroque figuration.

The exhibition at Galleria dello Scudo anticipated the retrospective scheduled in May at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and the great anthology scheduled in fall in New York at the Guggenheim Museum. Enrico Crispolti, curator of the general catalogue of the works edited by the Archivio Lucio Fontana in Milan, is the author of a text in the catalogue print for the occasion, in which he evokes the figure of the artist personally met and frequented.