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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jun 5, 2019 | Dorotheum | Vienna | Contemporary Art I | 215 | $****** - ****** | Crocifissione |
paintings
40 x 32 x 6.5 cm (15.75 x 12.6 x 2.56 in)
painted and glazed terracotta
signed
Pancera Collection, Milan Galleria Tonelli, Milan European
Private Collection
signed, painted and glazed terracotta, 40 x 32 x 6.5 cm, framed
The work is registered in the Archive of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan and is accompanied by a photo certificate
Provenance:
Pancera Collection, Milan
Galleria Tonelli, Milan
European Private Collection
I am looking for something else. During my long stay in the laboratories in Sevres, I researched and studied form. I continued to model, as in my studio, figures and metamorphoses that weighed 100 kilos,
I painted them with strong colors.
My sculptural form is never dissociated
from the color. My sculptures were always polychrome.
I colored the cast, I colored the terracotta.
Lucio Fontana
, I sculpted my first ceramic in Argentina in 1926: the "Charleston Dancer" bought by the gallery of modern art in Rosario, Santa Fe. It was, however, only in 1936 that I became properly active in this field with the production of around fifty pieces: seaweed, butterflies, crocodiles, lobsters, an entire, petrified, gleaming aquarium. The material was attractive;
I could shape a seabed, a statue or a lock of hair and impose a pure and compact color which amalgamated in the fire. Fire was a sort of intermediary: it perpetuated form and color. After the aquarium, I sculpted busts, masks, metamorphoses; my women with their golden faces toured Italian galleries. The material was shaken to the core but stable. Critics referred to it as ceramics. I called it sculpture. '
Lucio Fontana
Fontana was involved in avant-garde artistic research at Milan as early as the 1930s. His research was characterized by experimentation, yet marked by some structural constants.
In these years, however, Fontana proved himself to be more innovative than his contemporaries in his desire to communicate with architecture, to "act spatially" (Crispolti). His terracotta works suggest a predisposition towards a new material flexibility. His chromaticism, which extends from coarse, stoneware tones to lighter, glazed colors, becomes the instrument capable of freeing material from its stasis.
Time spent at ceramicist Tullio Mazzotti's studio in Albissola between 1935 and 1936 was a turning point in Fontana's research. 1937 created new figures, shapes, ceramics which push way beyond simple decorative intent, vibrating with a new expressive and expressionist touch ".
1947. His Argentine stay incubated the product of the immediate post-war period; Spatialism, as well as a new syncretism in his sculpture: "it was the founding themes of Spatialism, in particular the holes , which would literally incise and cross the first abstract ceramics to be created at the threshold of the fifties. On the one hand Fontana crosses, age, rubs into the clay tablets, tracing both a spatially defined sign, as well as boring into the surface in a serrated rhythm, following the more recent dictates of his personal, Spatialist spirit. On the other hand, beginning with a tile, a terracotta surface, he casts a nucleus of material on the surface and [...] creates and delineates in the freedom of the contrast between material, color, gesture, and space a figurative world which exists in the ambiguity of a new potential identity ".
The series created by the artist in the post-was period consciously mixes the sacred and the profane, interpreting popular themes in an original manner: "he now addresses the production of crucifixes, unstable and suspended in their abyssal, stellar material, through a systematically stylized, evocative representation, immersed in the struggle between the darkness symbolizing pain and the light generated by the mystical luminosity of gold. It was the birth of a font that would Fontana would define as Baroque. This quintessentially vital term has been used by Fontana in exactly this 'storminess', in a creative sense of space, that is unstoppable, pure, compelling instability of Wolfflinian origin ".
L.M. Barbero, La scultura come un brivido, 2015
