Nothing was shaped or glazed by Fontana without his consideration of how light could interact, animate, or even mystify form.
Lucio Fontana
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The Politics Behind the Massacred Canvases of Lucio Fontana
Will audiences ignore the Argentine-Italian’s fascist past to celebrate his first US museum survey in more than 40 years?
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Lucio Fontana’s Surprising, Enveloping Installations
Among Fontana’s least-known works, the Spatial Environments feel like the pieces that can allow for a better understanding of the depth and breadth of the artist’s practice, which is too often solely associated with the famous cut-up paintings.
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Lucio Fontana’s Psychedelic, Ceramic Crucifixes
The artist best known for his slashed canvases made a series of clay Christ figures between 1948 and 1961.
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Surveying Modern and Contemporary Art’s Embrace of Ceramics
PARIS — Conversations about art and medium-specificity are almost always conversations about history.
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Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: a dog sculpture goes missing in Albuquerque, meth smugglers hide drugs in art supplies, and an artist sues Wu-Tang Clan and Martin Shkreli.
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Broken Utopia: Abstract Painting in Italy
Nobody believes in the simple narrative arc of Modern Art anymore; even so, Painting in Italy 1910s–1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art at Sperone Westwater is an instructive glimpse into the fullness and complexity lying beneath thumbnail histories of the avant-garde.
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Lucio Fontana’s Proto-Technologism
PARIS — If you want to leave all imagery behind for a free-fall into the immersive deep space of the virtual, Lucio Fontana is your quintessential man.
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I See Pretty Things at Design Miami
MIAMI BEACH — It was refreshing to wander around a Miami fair that doesn’t appear to have a fear of pretty things. In the design world, unlike the art world, beauty isn’t considered a dirty word, so, wandering through the aisles of the 2013 Design Miami fair, I could see an obvious affection for beauty in a way that oozes status and wealth.
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Alien Skins: Experimental Italian Painting of the 1960s
Sometimes the quietest and most unassuming exhibitions turn out to be the most fascinating, if not the strangest.
Tucked away on the third floor of Sperone Westwater’s Bowery building, there’s a show titled Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano. That’s it. No jazzy tagline like “Treasures of Proto-Arte Povera” or “Secrets of Euro-Neo-Pop.” Just Post-War Italian Art: Accardi, Dorazio, Fontana, Schifano.
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Is The Art Show a Senior Citizen’s Swinger’s Club Past its Prime?
The Art Show has been hosted by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) for the last 23 years, reigning supreme as the longest running national art fair. The ADAA consists of 175 galleries but only seventy exhibitors enrolled this year, excluding stunners like Andrea Rosen, Betty Cunningham, PPOW and Gavin Brown. A large majority of the participants are located uptown between 50th Street and 90th Street. The generalized content (“cutting-edge, 21st century works” and “museum quality pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries”) and my fears of dated academia prepped me for the deflated viewing that was The Art Show. The ADAA’s Executive Director spoke to the “calm and intimate atmosphere” of The Art Show. Although the Park Avenue Armory’s soaring “balloon shed” construction is partially responsible, the cavalcade of elderly patrons weren’t exactly rambunctious. The air-kisses exchanged between crotchety senior citizens summoned a swinger’s club way past its prime.
