Lucio Fontana Biography

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899. Initially trained as a sculptor, Fontana rejected traditional artistic materials and invented his own methods. Fontana considered art works as concepts of space, using holes and cuts in canvases to reveal unseen spatial areas. His destruction of physical and intellectual traditions created a new movement called Spatialism, which turned objects into three dimensional spaces and turned mundane spaces into experimental environments. Figure Nere (Black Figures) (1931features a rough-hewn, rectangular terra-cotta slab with two black silhouetted figures, with the material manipulated to suggest a sense of physical space in the image.