Lucio Fontana was born on February 19th 1899 in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina. His father Luigi was an architect and sculptor from Varese who had emigrated to Argentina a year earlier and his mother was Lucia Bottini, an actress of Italian origin born and raised in Rosario, daughter of the Swiss painter and engraver Jean Bottini.
Luigi Fontana, thanks to the skills acquired in Italy where he had attended the Academy of Brera and had worked with his father who owned a company of architectural decorations in Varese, had developed in Rosario di Santa Fe an intense activity of sculpture thanks to a company that has come over the years to great renown, which operated in the context of competitions for memorials and funerary portraiture.
From school age, Lucio is sent to Italy for his studies and entrusted to his uncle in the province of Varese. Here begins the apprenticeship of the artist, with the practice in the studio of his father sculptor returned in the meantime in Italy.
After the parenthesis of the First World War, in which Fontana enlists in 1916 as a volunteer but from which he is discharged after two years due to a serious injury, he returns to Rosario Santa Fe in 1921 to devote himself to sculpture working in the atelier of his father "Fontana y Scarabelli". But soon he will start a free sculptural research, free from commissions, opening his own studio. In 1927 he receives his first important commissions and wins some public competitions and in the same year he returns to Italy, where in Milan he enrolls in the first year of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, beginning to follow the courses of Adolfo Wildt.
In 1930 Fontana participates in the 17th Venice Biennial and holds his first solo exhibition at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, where with Uomo Nero he exhibits a work of profound rupture, dealing with the theme of human figures which, deprived of their plastic value, are reduced to geometric shapes. Fontana approaches the environment of Lombard abstractionism and continues with his formal experiments also using ceramics.
Back ito Argentina, he is the protagonist of numerous exhibitions and teaches modeling and decoration at the Academy and the school of plastic arts. From the contact with young artists and intellectuals was born in 1946 the Manifiesto Blanco and the same year in a group of drawings of the artist appears the term "Spatial Concept", a title that will accompany much of his subsequent artistic production. In 1947 he returned to Italy and settled back in Milan where the first Manifesto of Spatialism was born where it is supported the need to overcome the art of the past and to produce new forms of art using the innovative means made available by the technique. In the wake of a celebration of modernity and its new techniques, in 1949 Fontana creates an emblematic work at the Galleria del Naviglio: Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Environment in Black Light), in which a series of phosphorescent and fluctuating elements are hung in a completely black space. In the same year the spatial research is deepened with the series of "Holes" (Buchi), pictorial works where to the chromatic intervention are added holes made by the artist, that Fontana describes using this words: "I hole; the infinite passes through there, the light passes, there is no need to paint. Everyone has believed that I wanted to destroy: but it is not true, I have built, not destroyed" (L. Fontana in AA. VV., Dal testo alla storia dalla storia al testo, Letteratura italiana con pagine di scrittori stranieri, Paravia, Torino, 1993). The following experimentations are the “Oils”, canvases sprinkled with chromatic matter on which Fontana intervenes with impetuous gestures, causing holes and lacerations through which the artist does not only cut the canvas, but goes beyond it, breaking the temporal limit of matter to shape a new dimension stretching to infinity: "I want to open a space, create a new dimension, connect to the cosmos that expands to infinity, beyond the confining plane of the painting" (L. Fontana in AA. VV., Dal testo alla storia dalla storia al testo, Letteratura italiana con pagine di scrittori stranieri, Paravia, Torino, 1993).
It dates back to 1954 the participation together with Leoncillo to the XXVII Venice Biennale. The dialogue between the two artists gave rise to a passionate reflection on the synchronicity between color, time and space.
The experimentation of innovative materials such as neon, ultraviolet lights and fluorescent paints, led him to create avant-garde installations such as the one created in 1951 for the IX Triennale in Milan. He is also among the first visual artists to grasp the importance of the medium of television and in 1952 he participates in one of the still experimental broadcasts of RAI presenting his Spatial Concepts in the form of moving images.
The 1966 is the year of important international success and various solo exhibitions are organized: the one at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Marlborough Gallery in New York and the Galerie Alexander Iolas in Paris. Very important in Italy is the room that is dedicated to the XXXIII edition of the Venice Biennale, where he worked with the architect Carlo Scarpa to create an oval labyrinth illuminated by a white light where a series of white canvases crossed by a single cut were arranged throughout the space: an innovative work that wins the prize of the Biennale. The 1967 is the year in which culminates the rigorous monochrome with the tendency to tear the canvas and through signs increasingly regular and essential. The revolutionary scope of Fontana's art is also interpreted in other creative environments, inspiring stylists and designers: in 1969, the stylist Mila Schon dedicates a collection to his Cuts and, always referring to the artist's canvases, invents the doble face fabric. At the beginning of 1968 Lucio Fontana leaves his studio in Corso Monforte as Milan and moves to Comabbio (VA). He dies in Varese on September 7 of the same year.
After Lucio Fontana's death, major anthological exhibitions were held, including the most recent "Lucio Fontana, Rétrospective," realized in 2014 at the Musée d'Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris; "Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold," held in 2019 at The Met Breuer and The Met 5th Avenue in New York; "Lucio Fontana. Retrospective" realized in 2019 at MaMM - Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow and "Lucio Fontana: En El Umbral," realized in 2020 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 1998 the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. hosted an international group show where, together with works by De Chrico, Balla, Franz Kline, Pomodoro and Allen Jones, oils by Lucio Fontana were exhibited.