Exhibition catalogue edited by Tornabuoni Arte. Texts by Roberto Casamonti, Enrico Crispolti, Luca Massimo Barbero and Gillo Dorfles.
B/w and colored illustrations, 240 pages, 9,4×11,8 in, Italian/English, 2023.
The catalogue was published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition of Tornabuoni Art's new venue in Rome.
In keeping with Tornabuoni Arte’s tradition, the inaugural exhibition has been dedicated to Lucio Fontana, one of the most emblematic artists in the gallery’s history. As Roberto Casamonti recalls, ‘Many years ago I happened to read on the back of one of Fontana’s works the sentence “Today is a beautiful day to live” […] to this day, whenever I am about to embark on a new beginning, this statement comes to mind. And especially […] on a day that celebrates the opening of the gallery’s new branch in Rome, with an exhibition dedicated to Lucio Fontana.’ An exhibition that Roberto Casamonti chose to dedicate to the memory of Enrico Crispolti and that benefits from the critical contribution of Luca Massimo Barbero.
The published works include more than thirty pieces spanning almost the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre. A journey through the different stages of Fontana’s pictorial language, from his ceramic works from the 1930s and 1940s, including Via Crucis of 1947 - the first of three that he created, consisting of fourteen glazed terracotta moulds made in the Albissola factory - to the Baroque compositions from the 1950s, which saw the introduction of new elements such as stones, sand and sequins, including Concetto spaziale, L’Inferno from 1956, and finally the cuts from the 1960s. The catalogue comes to a close with the work Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio from 1963, the highest expression of the artist’s poetics and the apex of his plastic research in the spatial sense, defined by Fontana himself as the infinite, the inconceivable thing, the end of figuration, the principle of nothingness.
The catalogue comprises essays by Enrico Crispolti, Luca Massimo Barbero, Gillo Dorfles as well as a handwritten document by Piero Dorazio.