Lot 51. Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Madonna con bambino ed angeli, firmata con le iniziali e datata LF 47 (sul retro), terracotta smaltata e lustrata, cm 40x26x17. Realizzata nel 1947. Estimate EUR 60,000 - EUR 80,000 (USD 64,376 - USD 85,834) © Christie's Images Ltd 2017

Opera registrata presso la Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano, n. 4145/1, come da autentica su fotografia 

Provenance: Collezione privata, Milano

Note: Executed in 1947, the year that Lucio Fontana founded his groundbreaking movement of Spatialism, Madonna con bambino ed angeli displays the artist’s supreme command of form and space in the important medium of glazed ceramic. Radically reimagining the Madonna and Child, Fontana depicts an abstracted, flamboyantly gestural vision of this iconic religious subject. Clothed in deep, opulent cobalt blue, the figure of the Virgin sits enthroned in dark red drapery, the pale blue Christ seated on her lap; three putti flutter above the maternal scene, holding the swathes of material aloft. Conjuring an impression of divine weightlessness, the work combines its figuration with dominant Spatialist ideas. Fontana’s earliest artworks were produced in ceramic; he worked in a variety of sculptural modes in Liguria, Sèvres and Argentina throughout the 1920s and 1930s before returning to Milan in 1947. He brought with him a radical new outlook. Believing that traditional modes of painting and sculpture were outmoded and unable to reflect the modern epoch, Fontana called for a reformation of the visual arts. He wanted art to escape its frames, plinths and conventional categories to explore the dynamic concepts of movement, colour, time and space. Madonna con bambino ed angeli embodies this new freedom, while also looking back to the Baroque, which was a central influence on his Spatialist vision. Fontana was fascinated by the Baroque’s expression of movement through the grand and dramatic gestural force of its figures, declaring in 1946 that ‘[the] Baroque was a leap ahead… it represented space with a magnificence that is still unsurpassed and added the notion of time to the plastic arts. The figures seemed to abandon the flat surface and continue the represented movements in space’ (L. Fontana, Manifesto Blanco, 1946, in E. Crispolti and R. Siligato (eds.), Lucio Fontana, exh. cat., Rome, 1998, p. 115). These notions of movement, space and time lay at the heart of Spatialism. The religious subject of Madonna con bambino ed angeli immediately indicates the powerful presence the Baroque had in Fontana’s practice in this period, and the sculpture’s execution demonstrates how the artist used this style’s central tenets to forge his own abstract, spatial art. Fontana modelled his figures at high speed, enjoying the instantaneous fusion of pigment and surface when the glaze was fired; vigorously formed into a bold, multifaceted and richly textural apparition, the Madonna and Child hover in space with a swirling material exuberance.

Christie's. Milan Modern and Contemporary, 27 - 28 April 2017, Milan