Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina, in Rosario di Santa Fé, in 1899. In 1905 he moved to Milan, where he trained in his father’s sculpture workshop. In 1914 Fontana began attending architecture classes at the Technical Institute Carlo Cattaneo in Milan. The next year he returned to Argentina, and in 1924 he opened his own sculpture atelier. He went back to Italy in 1928 and studied at Milan’s Art Academy Brera. He participated in the 17th Venice Biennale in 1930 and joined the artists’ group Abstraction-Création in 1934. In Paris in 1937 he met Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi and Tristan Tzara. From 1939 to 1947 Fontana again lived in Argentina, where in 1945 he was appointed to a professorship in sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. His Primo manifesto dello spazialismo was published in 1947, and a short time later he produced his first works under the title Concetti Spaziali (Italian: spatial concepts). Artistic engagement with space would occupy him all his life. Numerous exhibitions followed; he participated in documenta 2 in Kassel in 1959, for example. Fontana died in 1968 in Comabbio, near Varese.
