Lucio Fontana is famous for his slashed paintings, but also for having inspired fashion designers as different as Mila Schön and Off White's Virgil Abloh. Yet not many remember his environmental interventions.
The latter were inspired by the artist's fascination with the first rockets launched into space in the late '40s and the first pictures showing the Earth from a rocket. These experiments were done in 1946 by scientist John T. Mengel, who began experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets. Mengel launched the rockets into near-earth orbit, conducting upper atmosphere experiments. Mengel also placed cameras in the research nose shell of the rocket that replaced the V-2 warhead. The cameas showed the planet set against the blackness of space, something that deeply struck Fontana's imagination.
In 1948 the artist stated: "Today we, the Spatialists, have escaped our cities, broken through our shell, our physical husk, and have looked at ourselves from above, photographing the Earth from flying rockets."
A year later, in February 1949, Fontana came up with one of his first spatial environments displayed at Milan's Galleria del Naviglio. The environment consisted in a dark room with a series of papier-mâché objects covered in fluorescent paint surrounded by UV lamps. The experiment was replicated in other exhibitions and art events but wasn't received well, even though Gio Ponti liked it and put it on the cover of Domus.
Proper spatial environments were theorised decades later and became a trend in the '60s, when Fontana continued his explorations inspired by the first voyages into space, creating installations in which neon lights seemed to be used as if they were Fontana's trademark slashes. The lights pierced indeed the darkness, breaking it, and dividing it into abstract shapes or into precise geometrical spaces.
There has been a renewed interest in Fontana's luminous spatial environments also thanks to an exhibition that was on between 2017 and 2018 at Milan's Pirelli HangarBicocca.
"Ambienti/Environments" was a celebration of Lucio Fontana's environmental art: it featured indeed nine Spatial Environments and two spatial interventions recreated for the first time since the artist's death. The difference between these two typologies is very important: environments were rooms with specific titles that integrated objects and with lights and space in relation, interventions are instead works commissioned by architects for open spaces.
Curated by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani and Vicente Todolí, and organised in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, the exhibition was the result of a long and detailed research that also prompted curators to try and recreate the original textile used by Fontana in one of his installations.
The event also inspired other curators to recreate further installations: the environments reconstructed for the current exhibition "Lucio Fontana: On The Threshold" at The Met Breuer and at the Museo del Barrio in New York (until 14th April) are actually based on the Pirelli HangarBicocca reconstruction studies for the "Environments" exhibition in Milan.
Yesterday the Pirelli HangarBicocca exhibition about Fontana won the 2018 Global Fine Art Award in the "Best Impressionist and Modern" category for solo artist shows. The award, part of the Global Fine Art Awards program, set up to recognize the best curated art, culture and design exhibitions around the world in museums, galleries, fairs, and biennials, didn't only confirm that there is a new interest in Fontana's luminous spatial spaces, but also proved that it is not grand exhibitions that win awards, but more compact events characterised by the highest curatorial quality.
Image credits for this post
1. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1298.html
2. Lucio Fontana, Spatial environment with neon, 1967/2017, installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. ©Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Photo: Agostino Osio
3 and 4. Lucio Fontana, Energy Sources, neon ceiling for "Italia 61", Turin, 1961/2017, installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. ©Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Photo: Agostino Osio
5. Lucio Fontana, Neon Structure for the IX Triennale di Milano, 1951/2017, installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2017. Courtesy Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. ©Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Photo: Agostino Osio
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