Lucio Fontana (Rosario 1899-Comabbio 1968)

He was born in Rosario, Argentina, but at school age he moved to Italy where he attended, at the same time, the Scuola dei maestri edili dell'Istituto Tecnico Carlo Cattaneo in Milan and the Scuola degli Artefici annexed to the Accademia di Brera. During the First World War, Fontana interrupted the School and enlisted as a volunteer, but in 1921 he was back in Milan where he resumed his studies and graduated as a building expert. In 1922 he returned to his native Rosario, where he worked in his father's atelier and later opened his own sculpture studio. In 1927 he returned to Milan where he enrolled in the first year of sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 1929. The following year was a year full of significant events for the artist: he participated in the 17th Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan. Between the 1930s and 1940s, Fontana began his first technical and figurative experiments and also returned to Argentina to follow the new competition for the Monumento Nacional and the Bandera, to be erected in Rosario. In Argentina his activity as a sculptor was very intense and during this period he continued his teaching activities first in Rosario and later in Buenos Aires. From his contact with young artists and intellectuals, the Manifesto Blanco was born in 1946 and in the same year the artist's drawings included the expression Spatial Concept, a title that would accompany his subsequent artistic production.In 1947, back in Mila-no, he embarked on a completely new research that was no longer figurative but abstract, spatial.In the early 1950s, he signed his fourth manifesto: Manifesto of Spatial Art and continued to work intensively on the Buchi cycle.During the 1950s, the Tagli (Cuts) also took shape, conceived at the end of 1958 and presented for the first time the following year in solo exhibitions at the Galleria il Naviglio and Galerie Stadler in Paris.Towards the end of the decade he also conceived the Quanta series and the Nature series.From the beginning of the 1960s he concentrated on the Olii series. To this series belong the works dedicated to the city of Ve-nezia, which were shown at his first US solo exhibition in New York. Inspired by the New York metropolis, he conceived the Metalli (Metals) and, at the end of the 1960s, the series of the Fine Gods. At the same time, he worked on the Teatrini, which earned Fontana international recognition at several important exhibitions.