Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale 1959

Concetto Spaziale 1959

Artist: Lucio Fontana
Title: Concetto Spaziale (for XXe Siècle No. 12)
Year: 1959
Medium: Pochoir in colour
Dimensions: 31 × 24 cm (12 3/8 × 9 5/8 in)
Edition: 1,500 — published by San Lazzaro, Paris
Publisher: San Lazzaro, Paris (XXe Siècle)
Type: Limited edition pochoir — from XXe Siècle No. 12

Description

Concetto Spaziale (1959) is a pochoir produced for the twelfth issue of XXe Siècle — the legendary Parisian art review founded and directed by G. di San Lazzaro, which between 1938 and 1976 published original graphic works by the most significant artists of the twentieth century, including Picasso, Miró, Ernst, Calder, and Kandinsky. The pochoir — a stencil-based printing technique associated with the highest standards of French fine art reproduction — presents two cuts on a flat green field: one vertical, one diagonal, the white paper showing through each incision with the clarity and finality of Fontana's hand.

The image is a reproduction of Fontana's most radical and most celebrated gesture — the taglio, the cut that defines his entire mature practice. Beginning in 1958, Fontana sliced through the surface of his canvases with a Stanley knife in single, decisive strokes, declaring that painting as a flat surface had exhausted its possibilities and that the cut — the literal penetration of the picture plane — was the only remaining gesture of genuine consequence. The Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept) works are not paintings with cuts in them; they are cuts that happen to be on canvas, the void beyond the surface being the actual subject of the work.

In the pochoir, the cut is simulated: the green field is printed flat, the white lines are printed rather than physical incisions. Yet the image retains the essential logic of the gesture — the surface interrupted, the void implied, the eye drawn to the gap between what is present and what is absent. For a review that circulated in an edition of 1,500, XXe Siècle produced some of the most significant original graphic works of the postwar period, each issue constituting a portfolio of original prints by its contributing artists.

Fontana's work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Guggenheim. His Concetto Spaziale paintings regularly achieve seven and eight figures at auction — making this pochoir an outstanding and historically significant point of entry into his practice.

Shipping & Delivery:
✔ Worldwide shipping from France
✔ Professional packaging with insurance
✔ Tracking number included for secure delivery