Lucio Fontana: Environments

Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) radically transformed our conception of painting, sculpture and space by transcending the two-dimensionality of the canvas, foreshadowing many movements of the 1960s and '70s such as Arte Povera, conceptualism and land art. As the founder of Spatialism, an artistic movement that emerged in Italy in the late ’40s, Fontana did away with the distinction between painting and sculpture, with his famous slashes and holes in the canvas. Environments is focused on Fontana’s pioneering work in installation art, with a selection of his seminal Ambienti spaziali (seen together for the first time). The Ambienti spaziali—rooms and corridors that the artist began to conceive and design in the late 1940s—were almost always destroyed once the exhibition was over; they are Fontana’s most experimental yet least-known works, due to their ephemeral nature.