Lot115 N11733 Lucio Fontana Concetto spaziale, Attesa
“With the slash, I invented a formula that I don’t think I can perfect. I managed with this formula to give the spectator an impression of spatial calm, of cosmic rigor, of serenity in infinity.”
An elegant ode to the infinite, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attesa from 1959, stands as a rare early and metallic articulation of the artist’s most radical invention: the tagli or cut. Distinguished by its iconic glistening gold and matte black striped palette, the present work occupies a foundational position within Fontana’s lifelong pursuit to reconcile matter and metaphysics, the earthly and the cosmic. Fontana’s seminal tagli paintings came to fruition in 1958, shortly before this work was produced —a radical gesture that embodied the artist’s Spatialist ideological stance. Slashing his canvases with a knife, Fontana deliberately destroys the flat picture plane. Its single incision—at once brutal and serene—constitutes not.mes rely a mark of destruction but an act of creation: the moment when painting transcends its own dimensional limits and opens into the infinite, a radical act and contribution which catapulted Lucio Fontana into the pantheon of twentieth-century art.
Executed only a year after Fontana’s first experimentations with the tagli, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa marks a decisive evolution in his Concetti Spaziali (Spatial Concepts), the conceptual and aesthetic culmination of the theories articulated in his 1947 Manifesto Spaziale. In that text, Fontana called for “a synthesis of art and science,” a new language that would “transcend the limitations of the canvas and the frame” to embrace the immensity of space. Through his cuts, he enacted this synthesis, fusing philosophical reflection and physical gesture in a single, audacious act. Fontana himself described his work as “an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality,” adding, “When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit… I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future.” (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 23) The 1959 exhibition of the Attese series at Milan’s Galleria del Naviglio constituted a watershed in postwar European art, heralding a new frontier in the understanding of space, surface, and gesture. As curator Bernard Blistène would later observe, “We no longer talk about preserving the integrity of the flat surface but about exaggerating its meaning. It is no longer a figure as a painting but a painting as a figure, destroyed, perforated, scratched, punctured. The artist acts like a predator.” (Exh. Cat., Musée National d’Art Moderne, Lucio Fontana: 1899–1968, Centre Pompidou, 1987–88, p. 17) In this context, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa emerges as both relic and revolution—an emblem of the artist’s career-long devotion to the act of creation through destruction.
- 1933
- 1946
- 1947
- 1949
- 1958
- 1966
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1933Lucio Fontana in his Milan studio with Bagnante (Bather), 1933.
Lucio Fontana began as a sculptor in the early 1930s and 1940s. His initial works, rooted in the avant-garde, defied European sculptural tendencies by balancing the abstract and figurative, spatial and baroque.
Fontana’s sculptures were pivotal to his artistic evolution into painting; the sculptures are evidence of Fontana’s progressive, innovative approach to material. -
1946Manifesto Blanco, 1946
Fontana’s foray into his important Tagli (Cuts) works began in 1946, after the influential publishing of his first collaborative, theoretical text Manifesto Blanco, demanding a synthesis of artistic genres and renunciation of traditional materials.
“We imagine synthesis as the sum total of the physical elements: colour, sound, movement, t.mes , space, integrated in physical and mental union. Colour, the element of space; sound, the element of t.mes and movement, which develops in t.mes and space. These are fundamental to the new art which encompasses the four dimensions of existence. t.mes and space.” -
1947The Spatialist movement
Fontana pioneered the Spatialist movement, which unified art and science to produce dynamic, physically engaging work for the mechanical age. Fontana wrote a formal Spatialist manifesto with peers of artists and critics in 1947, entitled Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo, which demanded a new form of space-oriented art. -
1949Fontana in the process of executing a Buchi.
By 1949, Fontana’s renunciation of illusory space and introduction of physical space in painting reached a turning point with his early Buchi (Holes) series. Composed of holes punched into canvas with an awl, the Buchi works laid the groundwork for Fontana’s exploration of surface manipulation and bold, physical alterations to the very structure of the canvas which he termed Concetto spaziale (1947–68). -
1958Concetto spaziale, Attese (T.104) (Concept spatial, Attentes), 1958. Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Fontana’s seminal Tagli paintings came to fruition in 1958, a major career milestone that displayed the artist’s radical gesture and embodied his Spatialist ideological stance. Slashing his canvases with a sharp Stanley knife, Fontana deliberately destroyed the flat picture plane. The first Tagli works were importantly exhibited in a one-man show at the Naviglio Gallery, Milan and shortly after at the Stadler Gallery, Paris in 1959. -
1966Lucio Fontana with his work at the Venice Biennale, 1966.
After a near-decade producing his iconic Tagli paintings and having prominent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Marlborough Gallery, New York; and Alexander Iolas Gallery, Paris; Fontana was awarded the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale.
His Tagli paintings cemented Spatialism in the canon and reinforced his revolutionary dialectic between painting and sculpture, surface and the void.
“My cuts are above all a philosophical stat.mes nt, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter; a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future.”
The alternating asymMetricas l bands of gold and black that envelop the surface imbue the work with both visual rhythm and metaphysical depth. Here, Fontana employs the decadent beauty of gold set against the void of black to heighten the spatial and symbolic resonance of his gestures. The present composition’s shimmering metallic ground, bisected by a single deliberate slash, exemplifies this ambition. The incision does not simply puncture the surface; it monumentalizes it, transforming the painting from a two-dimensional plane into a sculptural object, a gateway to an unseen beyond. Fontana’s fascination with gold was not.mes rely aesthetic but profoundly symbolic. Having received commissions for churches in his early career, the artist was intimately acquainted with the devotional splendor of Italian sacred art—the gilded panels of the quattrocento, the radiant altarpieces of Venice, the celestial ornamentation of Byzantine mosaics. Gold, in these contexts, signified divine illumination, the intersection of the material and the eternal. “The artifice of metallic color,” as Luca Massimo Barbero observed, “its mimetic, symbolic, reflective quality, had always fascinated Fontana: metal, the way light reflects from it and at the same t.mes penetrates, revealing its plasticity, had always represented a challenge for him… The silver and gold-colored Oils perfectly illustrate that sculptural ambiguity of his painting.” (Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, Exh. Cat., Peggy Guggenheim collects ion, 2007, p. 24)
In Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, the golden surface assumes this dual heritage. On one hand, it recalls the divine luminosity of Italian devotional painting; on the other, it gestures toward the metallic sheen of the modern age—the age of rockets, satellites, and cosmic exploration. “Gold is as beautiful as the sun,” Fontana once proclaimed, aligning the ancient symbol of sanctity with the technological sublime of the twentieth century. By situating his gesture within this continuum, Fontana collapses t.mes itself, merging the splendor of the past with the infinite potential of the future. The cut itself, so stark and unyielding, embodies this dialectic between creation and negation. Just as the Impressionists fractured light and the Cubists disassembled form, Fontana annihilated the surface altogether, exposing not representation but void. The gesture is both destructive and devotional: a contemporary echo of the stigmata that once adorned the bodies of saints, reimagined through the lens of modern abstraction. “Through this action,” wrote art historian Erika Billeter, “he declares before the entire world that the canvas is no longer a pictorial vehicle… Implied in this gesture is both the termination of a five-hundred-year evolution in Western painting and a new beginning, for destruction carries innovation in its wake.” (Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, Exh. Cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2006–07, p. 21)
At a t.mes when space travel was looking less like science fiction and more like a tangible reality, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa finds a means to enter the realm of the immaterial; not so much to define space as to re-define it, to open it up to a boundless array of possibilities. This work has the effect of marking an event, as it crosses the frontier towards a blinding conceptual and aesthetic point of no return: it collapses past, present, and future within the slender abyss of a single cut. Fueled by a desire to break free of the conventional limitations of the picture plane and engage in spatial transcendence, Lucio Fontana remains one of the most eminent innovators in the Postwar era.
