Lucio Fontana

In 1961, ten paintings from the Venezie (Venices) cycle by Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) were exhibited in the artist’s first American solo show at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. Audiences familiar with the artist’s slashed monochrome canvases were puzzled by the materiality of these works—surfaces densely encrusted with Murano glass and acrylic paint. To commemorate sixty-five years since Fontana’s New York debut, this presentation examines the evolution of Venezie through his lesser-known preceding series. Uniting paintings from Fontana’s Pietre (Stones) and Barocchi (Baroques) series with a masterpiece from his Venezie cycle, the selection not only highlights the artist’s interests in architecture, history, and the Venetian landscape but also the transcontinental foundations of his Spatialist vision.

The Venezie paintings synthesize over a decade of Fontana’s formal and conceptual investigations. In 1946, he and his students in Buenos Aires published the Manifiesto Blanco, laying the foundation for Spatialism. Inspired by Futurism, space travel, and emergent Latin American movements dismantling the boundaries between art and the environment, Fontana called for an art that took up space itself as a medium. In the years that followed, Venice emerged as a reservoir of inspiration for the artist—a place where Byzantine ornament, Baroque dynamism, and the shimmer of light on water offered a language for spatial thinking.

As the site of Fontana’s 2019 retrospective, the Breuer building provides a resonant context for this presentation. Fontana and Marcel Breuer shared preoccupations with history, material experimentation, and the collapsing relationship between art and architecture. Six decades after the Venezie’s New York debut, one of its finest examples, Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita (1961), is at home in a building that speaks a parallel language.

Fontana at the Independent 20th Century

Nahmad Contemporary’s exhibition at the Independent 20th Century calls attention to Fontana’s engagement with Venice and the lesser-known interests in architecture, history, and materiality that shaped his work. Since the artist’s first visit to New York in 1961 to debut his Venezie in the United States, narratives of his practice outside of Italy have remained primarily centered on the gestures of puncturing and cutting and on his relation to space-age aesthetics. In exploring the evolution of Fontana’s masterful Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita, in the first American city to encounter his Venezie sixty-five years ago, this presentation offers a deeper look into Fontana’s radical pursuit of space and the nuances of his Spatialist project. The Breuer building provides a fitting context for this reevaluation as the site of the artist’s landmark 2019 retrospective and a parallel icon of trailblazing mid-century spatial logics.