Immaterial: Lucio Fontana Ceramics

On Lucio Fontana's little-known engagement with ceramics

Given the sculptural properties of his famous slashed canvases, it is perhaps little wonder that Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) began his career as a sculptor.

Less well-known is his work as a ceramicist, which commenced in the mid-1930s and produced an exploration of materiality that profoundly informed his practice as an artist.

This interest was developed parallel to his painting and was, in many ways, indistinguishable from his work as a sculptor. As Fontana continued to create ceramics, he became increasingly obsessed with the concept of matter as it related to the mass and volume of the sculpted object. His exploration of the physicality and weight of a work of art prefigured his later desire to diminish the materiality of his art.

As Fontana scholar Paolo Campiglio writes here, “he sought to discover a form that could exceed its own materiality. He sought to test the possibilities of space. He sought to create an object with absolute plasticity. And he sought to discover an ideal abstract form, opposed to the accepted, geometrical forms.”