Luca Massimo Barbero – författare

The first-ever academic monograph on Italian master Lucio Fontana's groundbreaking sculptural practice, attesting to the artist's status as a pioneer of sculpture while revealing a lesser known side of his work.Lucio Fontana’s (1899–1968) Ambienti spaziali, or Spatial Environments, were immersive installations that included neon crystal tubes, paint that glowed under black light and captivating papier-mâché sculptures. Fontana’s use of technology pushed the boundaries of art beyond the canvas to “paint” with light and invite viewers into the physical space of the work itself. In spring 2020 Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles staged the first comprehensive presentation of Ambienti spaziali in the United States, carefully reconstructing the installations as they initially appeared from 1948 to the final years of the artist’s life. This accompanying volume is edited in collaboration with Milan’s Fondazione Lucio Fontana and includes a survey of Fontana’s contributions to the evolution of conceptual art, tracing his influence on other legendary figures such as Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell.

The first scholarly monograph in English devoted to Lucio Fontana's sculptural production, this richly illustrated volume charts the uncategorizable artist's exploration of sculpture from the 1920s until his death in 1968.Lucio Fontana: Sculpture considers bodies of work from different periods together, highlighting continuity and evolution in his oeuvre. Edited by Luca Massimo Barbero in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, this richly illustrated volume allows readers to discover Fontana’s rarely seen sculptural works, exhibited at Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street from November 2022 until February 2023.

This in-depth account of the iconic Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana’s career provides Mandarin speakers with a thorough introduction to his revolutionary practice.Lucio Fontana' is the first widely available introduction to Lucio Fontana’s practice in Mandarin, offering Chinese audiences a long-overdue opportunity to discover the full scope of the artist’s groundbreaking work. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of Fontana’s work at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, this new monograph marks the gallery’s third collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana and curator Luca Massimo Barbero, following the exhibitions and accompanying publications Lucio Fontana: Walking the Space; Spatial Environments, 1948-1968 (2021) and Lucio Fontana: Sculpture (2022). Edited by Barbero, a leading expert in Fontana’s practice, the book provides a detailed account of the artist’s influential career, richly illustrated with artwork and archival images. Over four chapters, texts by Barbero and Maria Villa, the Vice President of the Foundation, track the evolution of Fontana’s work, beginning with his early days as an artist in Europe and Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, moving through the birth of Spatialism in the 1940s and the development of his pioneering Ambienti Spaziali in the 1950s, and concluding with the innovative late works created in his final decade, including his iconic slashed canvases. Offering further insight into the artist’s theories, aims, and intentions are a selection of original texts written by Fontana between 1939 and 1968, which have been translated into Mandarin for the very first time.

Departing from his earlier figurative works and engagement with Futurist ideals, Italian painter Osvaldo Licini (1894–1958) turned away from realism in 1940 and painted only abstract works from then on. His paintings from that fruitful decision engage in a surrealist language of precise lines, solid colors and pregnant signs; colors and signs that Licini viewed as expressions of energy, willpower, ideas and magic. This catalog of Licini's show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the most comprehensive monograph of his work, marks the 60th anniversary of his death. That same year, Licini won the National Grand Prize for Painting at the 29th Venice Biennale, where he had shown 53 works—executed between 1925 and 1958—in a room of his own, mounted by Carlo Scarpa. This catalog gathers his complete works, including those displayed in that same venue 60 years prior to this 2018 show.

During the Festival of Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) in Milan in November 1970, Christo removed the white cloth in which he had wrapped the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in the Piazza del Duomo and placed it over the Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazza della Scala. This is viewed today as a key event in the contemporary art scene in Milan, a moment that Luigi and Peppino Agrati experienced live.They immediately contacted the artist and commissioned him to create works for the garden of their villa. Wealthy entrepreneurs, the Agrati brothers shared subtle and sensitive insights into art that fostered a deep understanding of the images that shaped their era.This show is the first time their collection is being revealed to the public, through a representative selection of Italian and American works of art donated with generosity and foresight by Luigi Agrati to the Intesa Sanpaolo. From a nucleus of sculptures by Melotti to masterpieces by Fontana, Burri, and Klein, the exhibition provides an in-depth examination of Italian 'Nuova Figurazione' painting ('New Figurative Painting'), working its way to the roots of the new 'Arte Povera' ('Poor Art'). The discovery of American art coincides with the Agratis' acquisition of works by the principal exponents of Pop Art - including the iconic Andy Warhol and his monumental Triple Elvis - and by the Minimalists, of which Dan Flavin's large neon work dedicated to Peppino Agrati is emblematic.In a kind of multiple constellation side by side with examples of Italian art, the collection reveals extraordinary works by Robert Rauschenberg (acquired in large numbers from the end of the 1960s to the 1980s), Cy Twombly (the original mediator between American and Italian art), and conceptual artists like Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth, whose experiments with language are displayed in a dialogue with those by Alighiero Boetti and Vincenzo Agnetti.

The catalogue raisonné of the works on paper by Lucio Fontana (Rosario de Santa Fe, 1899 – Varese, 1968) is one the most complete and cutting-edge publications on this fundamental aspect of the work of one among the leading protagonists of twentiethcentury’s artistic development. Experimentation on paper was Fontana’s chosen means to test the richness and novelty of his inspiration. In fact, through his works on paper he would constantly verify his insights, both in the embryonic and defining stage of his formal and conceptual discoveries. This catalogue raisonné starts with the astonishing corpus of figural works and culminates in the artist’s original invention of “spatial” art, which led to the creation and development of the highly individual “holes,” “environments” and “slashes.” The catalogue raisonné presents more than 5,500 works executed between 1928 and 1968, with individual entries that include bibliographical and exhibition reference.

Art, history and culture from 1948 to 1986. Nine hundred extraordinary photographs recreate the atmosphere of the post-war international art scene in Venice. Featuring artists such as Léger, Ernst, Picasso, Mattisse, Dalí, Fontana, Beuys, Oldenberg, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg.

The first catalogue about this specific period of Arnaldo Pomodoro's production (1956-1965)

A poignant, new artistic enquiry. Vertigo: Au Rendez-Vous des Amis presents the works of three extraordinary contemporary Italian artists, Francesco Candeloro, Riccardo De Marchi, and Arcangelo Sassolino. In this meeting of friends, arising out of the proposal to unite their apparently different approaches, lurk some marvelous snares for the senses. The book has been organized in a refined and unexpected manner so that each artist presents his works in a personal room, but subtly creates a sort of synesthesia, a relationship with the works of his neighbour, his friend, as if to shape cross-references and tensions that demand from the viewer an increase in attention, one that is subtle but necessary.

An homage to Venice, Muniz s project includes a series of completely new photos inspired by the old masters of the Cini Collection, paintings by the likes of Francesco Guardi, Dosso Dossi, and Canaletto. The artist revisits the theme of the capriccio in a contemporary key, simulating the brushstrokes with cuttings of illustrations from books on the history of art, carefully selected not only for their colors but also for the images they contain. Continuing the tradition of the artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, Muniz has rearranged these elements in a creative way, constructing new images that, through an interplay of allusions and quotations, intrigue and fascinate.

Franco Angeli was one of the leading figures in the Italian art of the post-war period. Often labelled superficially as Pop, he is revealed here, through new documents and studies, as an artist who took a surprising and unprecedented approach to his work. He made his debut in the fifties in a still little-known experimental Roman laboratory where the new generations encountered the masters of Italian art.This book reconstructs the stylistic and artistic reciprocities and the relations of Angeli with his friends and colleagues up until the sixties, a time when, with his attainment of an existential image that was at the same time deeply polemical and provocative, his work developed along versatile lines, in an original dialogue with the international context.

An extraordinary journey through art, politics, and society, with works by artists such as Renato Guttuso, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Mario Schifano, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, recounting and reflecting on the contrasts, transformations and new artistic trends in Italy between the end of World War II and the years of protest, from the opposition between Realism and Abstraction in the post-war period to the triumph of Informal Art in the fifties, Pop Art, and Arte Povera and Conceptual Art in the sixties.

This catalogue accompanies a Lucio Fontana exhibition at the Tornabuoni Gallery in Rome, with essays by Enrico Crispolti, Luca Massimo Barbero, Caterina Toschi and Piero Dorazio. Text in English and Italian.