Acquired directly from the artist circa 1966

Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 1986, p. 652, no. 66 T 123, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato di Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, Milan 2006, p. 847, no. 66 T 123, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals light handling marks to the top and right edges, and to the bottom left corner. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"I make a hole in the canvas in order to leave behind the old pictorial formulae, the painting and the traditional view of art and I escape, symbolically, but also materially, from the prison of the flat surface" (the artist cited in: 'Conversation with Tommaso Trini, July 19 1968, in: Exhibition Cataloguem Amsterdma, Stedelijk Museum; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 1988, p. 34).

Lucio Fontana's graceful Concetto Spaziale, Attesa is a magnificent archetype of the artist's revolutionary corpus of tagli: articulated in pristine white monochrome this belongs among the most iconic and celebrated of Fontana's engagement with the sculptural language of painting. Created in 1966 at the very height of the artist's career, this work coincides with the year Fontana was awarded the international Grand Prize for Painting at the XXXIII Venice Biennale. During this exhibition Fontana's recreation of an Ambiente Spaziale with a monumental slash in white, evinces the significance of this pigment alongside the incredible aesthetic impact of the single taglio. In the present work the combination of pure white ground dramatically ruptured by the incised line of Fontana's Stanley knife immaculately delivers the ground-breaking innovation that changed the course of Western art and subsequently eclipsed the breadth of Fontana's entire production. Acquired from the artist immediately after its production in 1966, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa has ever since remained in the same collection; as such the emer♔gence of this emblematic piece in public for the very first time marks an extremely rare and remarkable occasion.

By the mid-1960s Fontana had established the cut as his principal painterly vernacular.  Here, the serenely white monochrome and its elegantly fissured surface deliver a mesmerising and commanding exemplar of Fontana's revolutionary dialectic between painting and sculpture, surface and the void. By discarding traditional reverence for the canvas as an illusionistic window onto another world, Fontana's radical singular gesture cuts open artifice and exposes the abyssal black behind such an artistic fallacy. Emblematic in its pure-white simplicity, the immaculate wound of Fontana's uninterrupted laceration evokes the dynamic and momentary force of radiating light. Ablaze with energy, the alluring white arena of Concetto Spaziale, Attesa acts as an apt parallel to Fontana's idea of the artist as the source of creative energy, thus providing the perfect setting for his conception of pure space. Furthermore, simultaneously in dialogue with the sculptural quality of alabaster or Carara marble - the material of the artist's formative sculptural training in the studio of Adolfo Wildt - Fontana makes an illuminating analogy to Michelangelo's revolt against polished marble: akin to Fontana's own violent reaction against marble and concurrent will to rupture the two-dimensional picture plane, Michalengelo "wants to virtually abolish it, and he makes his last Pietàs as though he wanted only to make them from pure spirit, from pure light" (the artist cited in: Sarah Whitfield, 'Handling Space' in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 2000, p. 42). Reduced to the very elemental optical polarities of light and shade, black and white, the sculpturally ruptured white picture plane succinctly embodies the artist's revolutionary spatial theories while engendering a unique dialogue with the symbolic value of colour and form.  Here Fontana carved into the two-dimensional white canvas to perform a t🐎wofold open surgery on the very foundations of sculpture and painting.

Fontana began his process of making the slits by saturating the canvas ground with industrial shop-bought emulsion in pure monochrome.  While the canvas surface was still damp, the work was positioned on an easel and cut with a Stanley knife in a single, precise downward movement. The canvas was then left to dry with the incision in place. There was no room for error: if the cut deviated from Fontana's desired line, the entire canvas was discarded and the work destroyed: the incision, as unrepeatable as a brushstroke, could not be corrected. Once the slit was made Fontana would engorge and gently open out the cut with his hand, a gesture described by a close friend of Fontana's as a "caress" (Sarah Whitfield, 'Handling Space' in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 2000, p. 18). To hold the cut in place, Fontana applied black gauze to the reverse, covering the cut from top to bottom. The final gesture would complete the work: the lightest touch of his hand would ease the edges of the incision slightly inwards. Richly suggestive, we are left with a multitude of symbolic and theoretical allusions, however, above all via one superbly elegant gesture with the flick of the knife, Fontana initiated a fissure in artistic convention that was to pierce the very meaning of art, and open a philosophical dialogue with the possibility of the fourth-dimension. As surmised by the artist himself: "The discovery of the Cosmos is that of a new dimension, it is the Infinite: thus I pierce this canvas, which is the basis of all arts and I have created an infinite dimension, an x which for me is the basis for all Contemporary Art" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana, Venice/ New York, 2006, p. 19).