Lucio Fontana

(Italian, 1899-1968)

Combattimento tra galli
1957

Footnotes

This work is registered in the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan, under no. 3577/2, and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance
Private Collection, Italy (acquired directly from the artist circa 1957)
Thence by descent to the present owner


"Io sono uno scultore e non un ceramista"
(I am a sculptor and not a ceramicist)
The artist, "La mia ceramica", in Tempo, 21 September 1939

In recent years the importance of Lucio Fontana's ceramic works as a vital element of his entire oeuvre has become increasingly widely recognised. Displaying many of the attributes for which he is best known, works such as Combattimento tra galli and the two Nature Morte all from 1957 which comprise the following three lots, hover somewhere on the borders between object, sculpture and painting. Indeed, it was his ceramics which led the way to the later pierced and slashed Buchi and Tagli which are seen as the pinnacle of the artist's long aesthetic and conceptual development. In such sculptural works, we see a master in full control of his media, his thorough understanding of his practice producing objects which move beyond the material and into the realms of the spiritual.

The Argentinian-born son of an Italian sculptor, Fontana is thought to have started to learn the techniques of sculpting with ceramic in his father's studio. Moving to Milan in 1928, he trained at the Accademia di Brera under Adolfo Wildt, with his sculptures from this period showing the influence of his tutor's typically Italian representational style. Fontana's interest in ceramic was to fully develop from 1935, when he moved to Albissola, a small town on the north western coast of Italy celebrated for its pottery. As the present lots demonstrate, the soft and pliant clay allowed the artist the freedom to express his own inherent passion for creativity, facilitating the unique convergence of man and medium that we see here. It is Fontana's strong sense of the material at hand which we see most clearly in such works, these ceramics displaying what has been described as his "almost magical intensification of materiality" (Lóránd Hegyi in: Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist's Materials, Los Angeles 2012, p. 3). In Combattimento tra galli we find oblique references to reality in the form of the two combatant cockerels, their claws raised and beaks open in silent contest. The intensity, the shocking violence of the moment is captured in brightly painted daubs and gouges, a flash of beautiful savagery, and extraordinary depth. Meanwhile, lots 22 and 23 move even further into the realms of abstraction, defying their traditional titles to render the world almost unrecognisable. The distinctive slashes and stabs which decorate these moon-like orbs are unmistakably Fontana: mysterious, ambiguous and undeniably exquisite.

The beauty of Lucio Fontana's ceramic pieces seems to have been appreciated early in his career, with well-received exhibitions of such works in Paris, Milan and Genoa in 1937 helping to confirm his growing reputation. Indeed it was that same year that he was to be described by F.T. Marinetti, one of the founders of Futurism, as an "abstract ceramicist" in the Futurist manifesto Ceramica e Aeroceramica. Fontana himself rejected such a label, preferring to see himself simply as a sculptor, but ultimately, in the presence of such great art, these terms seem largely redundant. The quality of Fontana's sculptural works became fully appreciated once again after the comprehensive retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1987, and in 2014 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and since then their significance has become firmly established. Boasting a number of Fontana's most characteristic techniques and embodying the dizzying gesturality of his practice these ceramics - which appear for the first time on the open market - illustrate the talents of a genius, an alchemist capable of converting base materials into artistic gold.