For

Senior Years Students

Curriculum

VCE Art/Studio Arts

Aim

To reflect on your personal response to the work of Lucio Fontana.

Preparation

To do this activity you will need to:

• Read the information for Theme Two – Postwar Abstraction in Europe.
• View the work either online or in the exhibition.
• Research through the library or Internet.

Individual Task

What influence might a background in sculpture have on a painter?

A sculpture is considered three-dimensional. What do you think Fontana was suggesting by his comment that he wanted to explore the fourth dimension?

Research Questions

From 1947 on, Fontana's experiments were often entitled Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts). The artist's sculptures brought colour, considered to be under the dominion of painting, into the realm of the three-dimensional. In his early painting series Buchi (Holes) he dared to puncture the surface of his canvases, breaking the membrane of two-dimensionality in order to highlight the space behind the picture.

Starting in 1958, Fontana further reduced his paintings by creating matte, monochrome (one colour) surfaces, focusing the viewer's attention on the slices that broke the taunt skin of the canvas as it was pulled over the stretcher. Paintings such as Concetto spaziale, Attese 1965, have precise cuts that express the idea that the painting is an object, not solely a surface.

Some commentators see the surface of Fontana's painting as like skin, and the gesture of cutting as violent. Do you agree or disagree with this idea? Why?

Group Task

Discuss your response to this work with others.