Lucio Fontana – Teatrino 1964. UPDATE: THIS WAS UNSOLD
No less than five seminal works by Lucio Fontana from a private German collection, along with pieces by Alberto Giacometti and Sam Francis, will lead the Contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s in London on March 4. The seven works have a combined estimate of £15 million.
Sotheby’s describe it as the most complete survey of Fontana’s groundbreaking research to come to market in recent memory.
The breadth of Fontana’s experimentation during his most revolutionary years is exposed in work ranging from early punctures that questioned the confines of the picture plane to the dramatic cuts that transformed gesture into a three dimensional space. Most were acquired through the avant garde Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf, where the inaugural 1957 exhibition included the then unknown 29 year old Yves Klein. Fontana’s first solo exhibition here in 1960 was as influential as it was innovative. His language quickly resonated far beyond Europe, informing the work of artists like Klein, Anish Kapoor, Robert Irwin, Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. In their own way each extended the spatial and perceptual possibilities opened by Fontana.