Despite being celebrated for the seminal act of making holes in or slashing the canvas, Fontana began his career as a sculptor, initially training at his father’s firm where he would make funerary busts out of plaster or marble. In 1928, he enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera where he started training in the neoclassical sculptural tradition. However, soon after leaving the Accademia, the artist started to divert from the conventional rules of sculpture, finding his authentic and innovative artistic voice in a more radical approach.

In 1935, Fontana first visited the small town of Albisola where he began to use clay as a medium, in the workshop of the Futurist ceramist, Tullio Mazzotti. This began the younger artist’s lifelong devotion to ceramics, a sculptural medium that he valued for its expressive potential and the humble and historic connotations of the clay material.

Between 1950 and 1958, Fontana worked on the competition for the design of the fifth door of the Duomo of Milan, which he won jointly with Luciano Minguzzi; however his designs were never commissioned as they were deemed too radical, too different from the existing decoration of the cathedral. This pair of decorative pieces, that were perhaps originally intended as ornaments to door frames, dates from 1953–54, reflect Fontana’s experiments into decorative art forms during this period. The results of his endeavours, seen in his models for the Duomo door and in the present works, enliven conventional structures with his dizzying manipulation of the surface, interjecting the artworks into space while also indenting the clay, accentuating the pure form of these pieces. These ceramics, painted in pink with flecks of gold, also reveal Fontana’s great admiration for Baroque art, their swirling forms revitalised with an energy for the modern era.