Lucio Fontana - Source

Artist, born in Rosario, E Argentina. He was brought up in Milan, studied at the Accademia di Brera (1928–30), and in 1935 signed the First Manifesto of Italian Abstract Artists. He made his name as the inventor of Spazialismo (Spatialism) and as a pioneer of ‘environmental art’. He is best known for his bare or monochrome canvases, holed or slashed to create what he called attese. These in turn looked forward to the ‘gesture’ or ‘performance’ art of the 1960s.

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was a painter and sculptor born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina, the son of an Italian father and an Argentine mother.

Fontana spent the first years of his life in Italy and came back to Argentina in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor along with his father and then on his own.

In 1928 he returned to Italy, and there he presented his first exhibition in 1930, organized by the Milano art gallery Il Milione.

In 1940 he returned to Argentina.

From 1958 on he started the so-called slash series, consisting in holes or slashes on the painting surface, drawing a sign of what he named "an art for the Space Age".

Shortly before his death he was present at the "Destruction Art, Destroy to Create" demonstration at the Finch College Museum of New York. Then he left his home in Milano and went to Comabbio (in the province of Varese, Italy), his family's mother town, where he died in 1968.

Fontana's works can be found in the permanent collections of more than one hundred museums around the world.

Source

This article draws from the corresponding article in the Spanish Wikipedia.