Lucio Fontana | UN FUTURO C’È STATO. IL Y A BIEN EU UN FUTUR.
An Italian art historian once said that there were three essential twentieth-century artists in his country—the founding fathers, as it were: Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico and Lucio Fontana.
The exhibition “Lucio Fontana. Un Futuro c’è stato” was born out of a conversation with Pierre Soulages in 2020, during which these very different artists were compared, but linked by their relationship with time and space. Alongside Joan Miró, Fernand Léger and Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana was an artist—more a sculptor than a painter, no doubt—whom Soulages hoped would one day be exhibited in his museum.
This event stands as the first major exhibition on Fontana since his retrospectives at the Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou in 1987 and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2014. This one in Rodez is in keeping with the museum’s mission of presenting the great names of modern art, and offers a journey through Fontana’s entire œuvre, before and after the War, in Argentina and Italy, an evocation of his creative variety: paintings, papers, sculptures, ceramics and light, and space installations.
Exhibition catalogue (240 pages) bilingual, French and English. Edited by Professor Paolo Campiglio. Published by Gallimard.