Anniversary auctions at Bukowskis presenting Lucio Fontana

Fontana had already begun to work with the concept ‘Concetto Spaziale’ in 1947. A few years later he created the series Pietre (‘stones’) where he fused painting and sculpture by applying thick layers of paint on the canvas and then adding a collage of coloured pieces of glass. Shortly thereafter followed a series of works he called Buchi (‘holes’). Here the canvas was punctured and perforated with holes in order to break up its two-dimensional quality and expose the space behind the painting. It was towards the end of the 1950s that he began making the Tagli pieces, that, together with the Buchi, became the forms he continued to work with until his death in 1968. Through his ‘Concetto Spaziale’ Fontana succeeded in erasing the border between painting and sculpture.

The first Tagli were executed in the late summer and autumn of 1958 when Fontana was almost 60 years old. The canvases were filled with small diagonal cuts in formations. Fontana experimented with both the size and the shape of the Tagli. As time passed the cuts became fewer but more forceful. In order to achieve the right effect the artist was particularly careful with the surface of the canvas, first ‘purifying’ it with a matt, often water-based, monochrome colour. The pieces with only one cut are marked Attesa whilst the canvases with multiple cuts are marked in the plural Attese, translated as ‘hopes’ or ‘aspirations’, a meaning that gives the pieces an additional conceptual dimension. Fontana dressed the back of the canvas with ‘telleta’, strips of black gauze, in order to create the illusion of space and void beyond the cut. In Tagli destruction and creation became one. Each cut in the canvas is executed in a single decisive and irrevocable movement. The physical act that forcefully ruptures the canvas simultaneously opens up a new sculptural and spatial perspective of the dark infinity beyond the surface of the canvas.