Lucio Fontana Artworks
The Natures

The Natures cycle took place entirely in the two-year period 1959-1960; these works were conceived and created during the summer seasons spent in Albissola, a central location in Lucio Fontana's ceramic production. They are sculptures in lightly patinated terracotta or bronze, initially appearing as single-faced "pebbles" or complementary "bivalve" forms, later transforming into true "balloons", as the artist himself used to call them.

The holes and incisions that furrow these spherical surfaces are not random wounds, but profound gestures that evoke explosions, craters, cells, planets: elements that refer to a dynamic vision of the universe in continuous transformation.

This series represents one of the most significant moments in Fontana's sculptural production, which has its roots in his academic training at the Accademia di Brera, where he graduated in sculpture in 1930. Sculpture was his first artistic language, practiced since the 1920s and never abandoned. Even during periods of more intense pictorial experimentation, Fontana never ceased working with three-dimensional matter, finding in sculpture a privileged field to deepen his research on space.

The Natures thus stand as a point of synthesis between informal gesture and spatial reflection: on one hand the organic irregularity of forms, on the other the will to transform sculpture into a living presence in space, capable of dialoguing with light, emptiness and the surrounding environment.

Today the Natures are preserved in important museums and public and private collections, including the Museo del Novecento in Milan and the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, and are considered among the highest expressions of sculpture of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as an eloquent testimony to the profound connection between matter, form and concept in Fontana's artistic vision.