signature and date
at the back: stamp Galleria d'Arte il Prisma, Milan

The work is registered at the Lucio Fontana Foundation with the no. 3319/1

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Gallarate
Il Prisma art gallery, Milan
Private collection, Milan

EXHIBITIONS
Galleria del Cavallino, Venice 1957
Galleria del Naviglio, Milan 1957

BIBLIOGRAPHY
L'Europeo, XVIII, n. 27, 8 July 1962. p. 33,
Gottschaller, 2008, p. 39
L'Europeo, XII, n. 7, July 2013, p. 59
L. M. Barbero, Lucio Fontana. Catalog raisonné of ceramic sculptures, Milan 2022, vol. I, p. 106 and vol. II, p. 483, n. 57 SPC 55

From the three-dimensional exploration of ceramic sculptures to his famous cuts, Lucio Fontana intellectually investigates the continuous alternation between full and empty, finite and infinite, light and darkness, matter and space.
The cycle of holes, which was inaugurated in 1949 as a natural evolution of the research proposed two years earlier with the First Manifesto of Spatialism, became the maximum expression of Fontana's baroqueism precisely in the encounter with the expressive potential of terracotta, a ductile and malleable, sensitive medium to the gesture due to its nature.
The "spatial concepts" on colored terracotta graffitied with holes represent the meeting point with the plastic study of the 1930s, summarizing Fontana's entire artistic research which insists on the concepts of anti-matter, gestures and unity of the arts for the overcoming of forms already known.

"I make a hole, infinity passes through there, light passes through, there is no need to paint. Everyone believed that I wanted to destroy: but that's not true, I built, not destroyed, that's the thing. Which, afterwards, I give it an aesthetic structure [...] it is a reason of aesthetic taste"
(Lucio Fontana)