“We do not intend to abolish art or stop life: we want paintings to come out of their frames, and sculptures from under their glass cases. An aerial, artistic portrayal of a minute will last for thousands of years in eternity.”— Second Spatialist Manifesto, 1948



Lucio Fontana’s beautiful La Novia, created in 1940, is a contemplative and intriguing piece, alive with a sense of expectation, serenity and collectedness. The rough edges of the piece and undelineated edges between the subject's body and her dress, exemplify the tenets fundamental to Fontana’s Spatial Art, defined by the artist himself as “neither painting nor sculpture, nor lines delimited in space, but continuity of space in matter.” Moreover, the miniature peaks and troughs of the highly worked surface witness and evoke the artist’s own highly dynamic, gestural approach to his medium. Indeed, there is an intensely tactile quality to this sculpture, accentuated by its delicate polychromy.


La Novia dates from a pivotal period in which Fontana was involved in both figurative and abstract projects. Indeed, this work was made shortly after the artist arrived in Argentina, where is lived during the years of the Second World War, and where he honed his vision for a totally new language of art, that culminated in the Spatialist Manifesto of 1947. This artwork, in equal measures form and subject, presages Fontana's later Spatial experiments in ceramics and painting.



The 1940s and early 1950s in particular witnessed Fontana’s creation of much of his figurative sculpture. Many, including his famous series of crucifixes, explore religious subject matter, and his reliefs for the fifth door of the Duomo in Milan, completed in 1956, mark the culmination of this project. In the same period, Fontana concurrently began to create his first series of paintings in which he punctured the canvas with buchi (holes), as well as his first spatial environments, which originally combined shapeless sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and black lights viewed in a dark room, soon integrating neon tubing into their ceiling decoration.

In the Manifiesto Blanco, published by Fontana and a group of his students in Buenos Aires in 1946, the nascent Spatialists declared that “We live in the mechanical age. Painted canvas and upright plaster no longer have a reason to exist.” Yet in Fontana’s La Novia and other figurative works of the 1940s and '50s, Fontana insisted that “upright plaster” did indeed merit existence, pushing his sculptural materials to their limits in order to capture an inexorable and wholly modern sense of form and interaction with space.