FONTANA LUCIO

Italian artist Lucio Fontana tore apart the modern art establishment -literally. Trained initially as a sculptor, Fontana (1899-1968) blurredthe lines between painting and sculpture by creating works that combinedboth form and color in a spatial context, most famously exemplified by hisslashed canvases of the 1950s and 60s. Fontana's work was truly conceptual,in that the ideas he wanted to express were more important than the actualwork itself. With titles like "Concetto Spaziale" (Spatial Concept) and"Scultura Spaziale" (Spatial Sculpture), his pieces served as visualexplanations of his ideas. From his early work in collaborating witharchitects through his years in Buenos Aires (where, in the mid-1940s, hepublished the famous "White Manifesto" and "Technical Manifesto ofSpatialism," among others), his experimental light installations of theearly 1950s, and his later experiments with various media, this bookcovers the entire career of Italy's pioneering abstract artist.