Lucio Fontana

Milan, Galleria dell'Ariete, Lucio Fontana, New York, 1962, no. 7 
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Fontana, 1980, no. 48, illustrated in colour 
New York, Marisa del Re Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1986, illustrated in colour
Tokyo, Tama Art University Museum, Lucio Fontana: Spatial Conception, 1990, p. 26, no. 22, illustrated in colour
Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum of Art; Kagoshima, Municipal Art Museum; Nishinomiya, Otani Museum of Art, Lucio Fontana: The Penetration of Space, 1992, p. 84, no. 45, illustrated in colour

Grazia Livi, 'Incontro con Lucio Fontana', in: Vanità, No. 13, Autumn 1962, p. 55, illustrated
Leader, No. 1, Milan, December 1963, p. 97, illustrated in colour
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. II, Brussels 1974, pp. 122-123, no. 62 ME 13, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 412, no. 62 ME 13, illustrated
Jole De Sanna, Lucio Fontana, Materia, Spazio, Concetto, Milan 1993, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Milan 2006, p. 598, no. 62 ME 13, illustrated

'How was I to paint this terrible New York? I asked myself? Then all of a sudden I had an intuition: I took some sheets of metal and set to work.'

(Lucio Fontana quoted in Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 45)

Lucio Fontana arrived in New York from Italy on the 15^th November 1961. He had already been showing extensively all over Europe and the shows in Kassel in 1959 and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1960 had attracted the interest of several American collectors. The trip coincided with the opening of the artist's exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery which brought his striking buchi and tagli works to an international audience. Fontana met the prominent New York art dealer through Philip Johnson, at that time Director of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art.

This first and only trip to the USA opened Fontana's eyes to a mechanised and progressively metropolitan environment. New York was the city of the future: its uncompromising modernity, bustling atmosphere, traffic, noise and pace of life stimulated his innate curiosity towards the possibilities of new and experimental media, a media which would capture his experiences and reflect the nature of the city.

Fontana returned from New York determined to find a pictorial solution for the portrayal of the city which would become the New York series. Struggling to find a way to describe the environment of New York, Fontana's first attempt took the form of a mixture of oil and collage on board. The smooth opacity of the oil and materiality of the collage failed to convey "a city made of glass colossi on which the Sun beats down causing torrents of light" (Lucio Fontana in Grazia Livi, Vanita, p. 53).  The decision to use metal sheets was spontaneous: he explained his choice, stating that "...no other material so successfully captures the sense of this Metropolis made all of glass, of windowpanes, orgies of light and the dazzle of metal" (cited in Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 45).

Copper was the principal metal employed in the New York series. Fontana particularly enjoyed its malleability and the creation of multiple facets which left planes of reflections and shadows throughout the sheet. Copper was, according to Fontana, one of the few metals that could "reflect lights, forms and colours in magic deformation" (Lucio Fontana in Domus, no. 391, June 1962, pp. 33-36). Fontana's insatiable appetite for invention saw him experimenting with diverse materials throughout his career, aligning him with his contemporaries Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, both of whom sought solutions to the portrayal of pure form by the manipulation of new media. In the New York series, Fontana devised natural light as fundamental part of the composition, creating works which recalled the ephemeral patterns of reflections left by the sun on the glass windows of New York skyscrapers.

With Concetto Spaziale, New York 15 we see Fontana referencing the art of the past.  Reminiscent of Futurism's 'spectacularization of the city' the metallic surfaces signify movement, space and light in three dimensional form. The Futurist artists Boccioni and Severini made dynamic compositions inspired by city traffic and the pace of modern life; here, Fontana revisits this concept, depicting his version of New York's thrusting modernity by scratching and incising the metal surface with gestural graffiti strokes.

Executed in 1962 and exhibited at Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan, Concetto Spaziale New York 15 is a strikingly evocative depiction of the sights, sounds and movments of a city, immortalised by the indelible marks of Fontana's line. The scratches on the metallic field that, at first sight, might seem rather improvised are, in fact, the result of several careful pen studies Fontana executed prior to his full compositions executed on metal.  The long taglio slashing a vertical furrow down the centre of the work is an arresting focal point for the rest of the composition. The inspiration comes from Mies Van Der Rohe's Seagram Building, a crucial symbol of the city for Fontana's vision of New York. In one of his letters he wrote, "Yesterday I went to the top floor of the most famous of the skyscrapers... It seemed to contain the sun..." (Lucio Fontana in Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 42). The vertical elevation of the building and the darkness of its interior structure are echoed by the central taglio, which creates a dark interior cavity within the work, leaving the flat planes on each side to reflect light, just as in the glass windows of New York's signature skyscrapers.