Lucio Fontana

In 1961, ten paintings from the _Venezie_ (Venices) cycle by Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) were exhibited in the artist's first American solo show at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. Audiences familiar with the artist's slashed monochrome canvases were puzzled by the materiality of these works—surfaces densely encrusted with Murano glass and acrylic paint. To commemorate sixty-five years since Fontana's New York debut, this presentation examines the evolution of _Venezie_ through his lesser-known preceding series. Uniting paintings from Fontana's _Pietre_ (Stones) and _Barocchi_ (Baroques) series with a masterpiece from his _Venezie_ cycle, the selection not only highlights the artist's interests in architecture, history, and the Venetian landscape but also the transcontinental foundations of his Spatialist vision. The _Venezie_ paintings synthesize over a decade of Fontana's formal and conceptual investigations. In 1946, he and his students in Buenos Aires published the _Manifiesto Blanco_, laying the foundation for Spatialism. Inspired by Futurism, space travel, and emergent Latin American movements dismantling the boundaries between art and the environment, Fontana called for an art that took up space itself as a medium. In the years that followed, Venice emerged as a reservoir of inspiration for the artist—a place where Byzantine ornament, Baroque dynamism, and the shimmer of light on water offered a language for spatial thinking. As the site of Fontana's 2019 retrospective, the Breuer building provides a resonant context for this presentation. Fontana and Marcel Breuer shared preoccupations with history, material experimentation, and the collapsing relationship between art and architecture. Six decades after the _Venezie_'s New York debut, one of its finest examples, _Concetto spaziale, In Piazza San Marco di notte con Teresita_ (1961), is at home in a building that speaks a parallel language.