Lot 307. Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese, signed, titled and inscribed sono contento di questo quadro... (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 44.5 by 33.2 cm; framed: 58.4 by 47 cm. Executed in 1965. Lot Sold 787,400 GBP (Estimate 400,000 - 600,000 GBP) © Sotheby's 2025

Provenance: Shuzo Takiguchi, Japan (acquired as a gift from the artist)
Ayako Takiguchi, Japan (acquired by descent from the above)
Hideo Kaido, Japan (acquired as a gift from the above)
Acquired by descent from the above by the present owner.

Literature: Enrico Crispolti, Ed., Fontana: Catalogo generale: Volume secondo, Milan 1986, no. 65 T 148, p. 587, illustrated
Enrico Crispolti, Ed., Lucio Fontana: Catalogo ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Tomo II, Milan 2006, no. 65 T 148, p. 771, illustrated

Exhibited: Tokyo, The Contemporary Art Gallery, Fontana, February - March 1984, no. 8, n.p., illustrated in colour

Note:

“The idea is to discover the cosmos, new dimensions, the infinite.”
(Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 2014, p. 19)

A chromatic blaze incised with four vertical cuts, Concetto spaziale, Attese belongs to the most iconic body of work in Lucio Fontana’s œuvre: the tagli, or “cuts,” made between 1958 and 1968. The surface, saturated in luminous yellow, is quietly perforated, neither violated nor adorned, but opened. These incisions mark a culmination of Fontana’s lifelong ambition to reconcile matter and void, gesture and concept. In the yellow canvas, space is not depicted but enacted.

Fontana’s yellow is no incidental choice. He often spoke of a magnetic attraction to materials and colours that flirt with excess. The seductive glare of this shade underscores a paradox that runs through his work: conceptual clarity balanced by emotional charge. If Fontana often emphasised the conceptual rigour of the cut, he also confessed a desire to embellish. As Richard Tuttle observed, Fontana privileged invention over art, a distinction that he pursued not through ornament but through rupture. This tension found particular expression in his use of golds and yellows, colours that dazzle and dissolve, echoing both sacred icon painting and avant-garde materialism.

Lucio Fontana in his studio, Milan, 1962. Image: © Ugo Mulas. Art: © Lucio Fontana/SIAE/DACS, London 2025

The present work also tells a remarkable story of artistic kinship and exchange. Fontana gifted the present work to Shuzo Takiguchi, the Japanese poet, critic and artist who spearheaded Surrealism in pre- and postwar Japan. Takiguchi, a collaborator of Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Sam Francis, met Fontana in 1958 during his role as Commissioner at the Venice Biennale. Their encounter sparked a lifelong friendship grounded in mutual admiration and a shared philosophical sensibility. On the reverse of the canvas, Fontana inscribed the words "Sono contento di questo quadro..." ("I am happy with this painting..."). This handwritten note may hint at the personal resonance the work held for him at the moment of its gifting. Following Takiguchi’s death, the painting passed to his close friend and publisher, Hideo Kaido, and by descent to his daughter. The quiet trajectory of this painting across generations is not only a rare provenance, but a reflection of the personal history of trust and admiration and a shared philosophical ground.

To understand the radical force of Fontana’s gesture, one must situate it in the wreckage of postwar Europe. When he returned to Milan in 1947, Fontana found his studio obliterated by Allied bombing resulting in a stark confrontation with loss not only of objects but of a prewar artistic language. Where some of his contemporaries, like Henri Moore and Alberto Giacometti, reimagined figuration through existential lens, Fontana discarded representation altogether. Rather than rebuild on old foundations, he set about inventing a new spatial grammar, one born from absence. “My discovery was the hole,” he declared, “and that’s it” (The artist quoted in: Germano Celant, Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali, Milan 2012, p. 134). The pierced and later sliced canvases were not rejections of painting but extensions into time, space and idea.

This yellow Attese is part of that extension. The four incisions stretch vertically across the canvas with the precision of a measured breath. Though often interpreted as destructive, the cuts are more sculptural than violent. In this way, Fontana may be seen as engaging a tradition that dates back to Michelangelo. Just as the Renaissance master spoke of releasing figures from the stone, Fontana treated the surface as a volume to be unlocked. The act of cutting becomes revelatory like an unveiling of space hidden within flatness. What Michelangelo did with weight, Fontana did with void. And yet, where Michelangelo’s liberation emerged through mass, Fontana’s emerged through absence. His incisions recall not only classical sculpture but also the folds of Japanese byōbu screens, planes where emptiness and form are composed in rhythm.

Soga Nichokuan, Daoist Sage and Hawk, mid-17th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Michelangelo, Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici, Duke of Nemours, Sagrestia Nuova, Medici Chapels, 1524-34, San Lorenzo Church, Florence.

He had, after all, always thought in terms of scale. From the vast, immersive Ambienti Spaziali to these apparently modest works on canvas, Fontana pursued a single ambition: to give form to the infinite. His cosmology was both scientific and spiritual. “The idea,” he wrote, “is to discover the cosmos, new dimensions, the infinite” (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Lucio Fontana, 2014, p. 19). The cut became the means through which he folded the universal into the tactile, the immeasurable into the immediate. In this sense, his work resonates with principles of Zen philosophy, where the void is not mere emptiness but latent potential, and the gesture, swift and irreducible, is itself a form of illumination. The act of slashing the canvas becomes both destructive and creative, a meditative performance as much as a mark.

“When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit, I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter; a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future.”
(The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, 2006, p. 23)

Indeed, the incisions on this canvas feel less like wounds than thresholds. There is no trace of hesitation in their execution. Fontana worked with a sharp blade, usually a Stanley knife, pressing through the fabric in a single movement. The effect is pristine, almost clinical. Yet the spatial resonance of these cuts is what elevates the work above mere gesture. They invite the eye not to rest, but to pass through.

What emerges is a space charged with contradiction: joy and rigour, clarity and excess, science and sensuality. Fontana’s achievement was not simply to puncture the canvas, but to transform it into a site of metaphysical possibility. In Concetto spaziale, Attese, the yellow field becomes a radiant veil and its slashes openings into another order; one that resists image, demands presence, and insists that art, like time, is never still.

Sotheby's. Contemporary Day Auction. London, 25 June 2025