Lucio Fontana
Cut the canvas open, and turned a hole into a whole movement.
Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina in 1899 to Italian parents, trained in Milan, and spent the war years back in Buenos Aires, where the Manifesto Blanco of 1946 set out the argument. Spazialismo held that painting on a flat surface was finished and that art had to take account of space, time and new technology. He punctured canvases from 1949 — the Buchi — and from 1958 slashed them with a blade in single clean strokes, the Tagli, backing them with black gauze so the opening reads as depth rather than as damage. He also worked extensively in ceramic and made ambienti in light. He died in 1968.
The number of cuts and their arrangement is part of the identification, and the works are titled Concetto Spaziale with a suffix — Attese for the slashes — with the specific work identified in the Fontana catalogue raisonne maintained by the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, which is also where authentication is settled. This is a name with a serious forgery history, so certification is not optional. The black gauze behind the cut is original and should be intact; the canvases are frequently a single flat colour, on which any retouching is immediately visible.
If you own a work by Lucio Fontana
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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