(Rosario di Santa Fe, Argentinia 1899–1968 Comabbio)
Concetto Spaziale, Natura - Attesa, 1968, monogrammed L. F., inscribed E. A., bronze, 53 x 22 x 12 cm, Ed. E. A., (AR)

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It is complementary of 59 N 27. Conceived in 1959 and cast at a later date, this work is the E.A. from an edition of 2 + 1 E.A.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Cologne
T.R.F. Collection, Milan
Grossetti Arte, Milan
European Private Collection

Exhibitions:
Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Lucio Fontana, 5 February - 28 March 1970, exh. cat. no. 223, ill. 211 (terracotta example) Krefeld, Galerie Merian Edition, Lucio Fontana 1899 – 1968, 21 September - 26 October 1973
Verbania - Palazzina, Museo del Paesaggio, Biennale internazionale di scultura contemporanea, Aptico, il senso della scultura, July - September 1976
Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Arte in Italia: 1960 – 1977, May - September 1977, exh. cat. pp. 23, 76 with ill. Munich, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, 16 December 1983 – 12 February 1984, Darmstadt, Mathildenhöhe, 1 April - 27 May 1984, Bielefeld, 12 August - 23 September 1984, Lucio Fontana exh. cat. p. 93, no. 69 with ill.
New York, Panicali Art Fine Art, Lucio Fontana, Works 1958 – 1965, October 1988, exh. cat. no. 5 with ill.
Milan, Arte & Arte, Fuochi, terrecotte e ceramiche di Arturo Martini, Fontana, Melotti, Leoncillo, Nanni Valentini, Spagnulo, Castagno, February - April 1991, exh. cat. “I quaderni di Carlo Grossetti”, pp. 6–7 with ill. (another example exh.)
Bologna, Galleria comunale d’Arte Moderna, Lucio Fontana. La scultura in ceramica, 1 October - 24 November 1991, exh. cat. p. 78, with ill. (another example exh.)
London, Hayward Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 14 October 24 Novmeber 1999 – 9 January 2000, exh. cat. pp. 125, 206, no. 86, with ill. (another example exh.)

Literature:
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. catalogue raisonné des peintures, sculptures et environnements spatiaux, La Connaissance, Bruxelles 1974, Vol. II, pp. 102–103, no. 59 N 28 with ill.
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. c atalogo generale, Electa, Milan 1986, vol. I, pp. 348 – 349, no. 59 N 28 with ill.
Cecilia Chilosi, Liliana Ughetto, La Ceramica del Novecento in Luguria, Banca Carige, Istituto grafico Silvio Basile, Genoa, in “Christie’s International Magazine”, October - November 1995, p. 183, tav. 233 with ill.
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti ambientazioni, Skira (ed.), Geneve - Milan 2006, vol. I, p. 522, no. 59 N 28 with ill.

Concetto spaziale - Natura
The experience of sculpture is a salient moment, perhaps the most noteworthy, in Lucio Fontana’s artistic career. His adventure in sculpture is characterised by a constant syncretism between figurative expression and abstract investigation that was probably his true stylistic signature.
From the second half of the 1950s onwards, however, figurative ceramics, heated battles, sacred figures and masks increasingly gave way to Spatialist production and “abstract” sculptures. During this phase, cylindrical vases and ceramic and terracotta plates were left elegantly bare, marked only with holes and scratches in an elegant interplay of signs, light and shadows. At the end of the decade, his “Natures” were born, terracotta or bronze sculptures executed as mono-surface pebbles or complementary bivalve forms that later became “balloons” according to Fontana’s own definition (cfr.www.fondazioneluciofontana.it). His “Natures” mostly corresponded to the cosmic imagination to which the artist often referred.

Concetto Spaziale-Natura appears as an oval, cosmic, monolithic form that is violently divided into two parts and is characterised by an irregular, wavy surface, which seems to boil like magma in the spot where the artist slits it open with a vertical cut. This object – or “Concept” – has something mysterious and primeval. Something celestial.

Those were the years of astonishing technological progress leading to the launch of the first satellite in history in 1957, Sputnik 1, marking the beginning of the area of space exploration. Four years later, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to complete a full elliptical orbit of the Earth on the Vostok I spacecraft.
Just like Fontana’s entire output, this work testifies to Fontana’s passion for the incommensurability and mystery of that unknown and boundless place.

I was thinking of those worlds, of the moon with these…holes, this terrible silence that causes us anguish and the astronauts in a new world. And so…in the artist’s fantasy these immense things have been there for years…man arrives, in mortal silence, in this anguish, and leaves a vital sign of his arrival…were these not still forms with a sign of wanting to make inert matter live?
(Lucio Fontana, in Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto, p. 389)

From an important Private Collection