INFERNO

Lucio Fontana – Ambienti/Environments – Curated by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani and Vicente Todolí – HangarBicocca Milan – 21 September 2017 – 25 February 2018 – Opening Wednesday 20 September 2017, 7 pm

Lucio Fontana (b. Rosario, Argentina, 1899, – d. Varese, Italy, 1968) was one of the most influential Italian artists of the mid-twentieth century. His work radically transformed our conception of painting, sculpture, and space by transcending the two-dimensionality of the canvas, and foreshadowed many movements of the 1960s and 1970s, like Arte Povera, Conceptualism, Land Art and Environmental art. As the founder of Spatialism, Fontana notably did away with the distinction between painting and sculpture, with his famous slashes and holes in the canvas. A fundamental but lesser-known aspect of the artist’s practice, beginning in 1949, was his investigation and development of spatial environments: full-fledged architectural settings that played with visitors’ perceptions in an often disconcerting way.

This exhibition, produced in partnership with the Lucio Fontana Foundation, presents a reconstruction of about ten of these environments some of them remounted for the first time since the artist passed away.

Lucio Fontana – Ambiente spaziale © Fondazione Lucio Fontana