Concetto Spaziale, Attesa
Date: 1966
Medium: Water-based paint on canvas
Dimensions: 55 x 46 cm
This beautiful Concetto Spaziale, Attese is one of a series of works Fontana made in Milan between 1958 and 1968. These works, which all consist of a surface that has been sliced once or multiple times, are collectively known as the tagli (cuts). Considered together, they are Fontana’s most extensive and varied group of works and they have come to be seen as emblematic of his gestural aesthetic.
Fontana first began puncturing the surface of paper or canvas in the late 1940s, blurring the distinction between two- and three-dimensionality. Recognising the importance of this innovation, he continued, through the 1950s and 1960s, to seek different ways of developing the hole as his signature gesture. The first tagli were made in the late summer and early autumn of 1958. They comprised small, often diagonal incisions, composed in groups over unprimed canvases. During 1959 these tentative slits evolved into single, more decisive slashes, and soon thereafter into multiple slices, each cut was made with a single gesture using a sharp blade.
Although Fontana experimented with a variety of colours for his monochrome tagli, he concluded that white was the ultimate hue to attain the sense of limitless, infinite space and radiant luminosity that he wanted to convey with these works. White, the artist said, is the “purest colour, the least complicated, the easiest to understand”, that which most immediately and most successfully conveyed the “pure simplicity” and the “pure philosophy” which preoccupied him in the later years of his career.
As is the case here, Fontana added the subtitle 'Attese', meaning 'expectation' or ‘waiting’, to many of his tagli. By adding this word to his standard title of Concetto Spaziale, Fontana imbues the boundless infinity he envisaged beyond the thin, elegant chasms of darkness created by his lacerations in the canvas with a sense of buoyancy and freedom. This realm is at once the immeasurable space beyond earth and the limitless capacity of the human mind and imagination. By opening up and redefining the possibilities of art itself, Fontana sought to unlock the parameters of human consciousness, liberating what had been stifled by conventional society.
Provenance
Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist around 1966)
Private Collection, Switzerland
Literature
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Generale, II, Milan 1986, p. 652, no. 66 T 123, illustrated.
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, II, Milan 2006, p. 847, no. 66 T 123, illustrated.
Shown at VOENA
- TEFAF New York 2026 — 15 – 19 May 2026, Park Avenue Armory, New York