Ambiente Spaziale (Space Environment), 1981 (first version 1967, destroyed)

The son of an Italian sculptor who immigrated to Argentina, Lucio Fontana was born in Rasrio de Santa Fè and died in Comabbio, Varese, in 1968. He came to Italy in 1905 and began his artistic career in the 1920s.

Fontana practiced a figurative style of clay and ceramic sculpture that was nervously modeled and painted in naturalistic colors, quite outside of the official artistic tendencies of the time. In 1935 he devoted himself entirely to abstraction, creating a series of plaster sculptures situated on irregular geometric planes with marks gouged into them.

He then returned to figuration with a long series of ceramics innovative for the value placed on the manual labor that defines the images' bold planes.