'Mani-fatture' - Lucio Fontana's 'second soul' in ceramics

Lucio Fontana in atelier ad Albissola

In Liguria, working side by side with his friend Tullio d'Albissola (Tullio Mazzotti) and the craftsmen of the Mazzotti furnace, he built up a universe of relationships and experimentation. The seventy or so works on display, selected from the more than two thousand he created during his lifetime, show a protean creativity: clowns and crocodiles, crucifixes, portraits, sea creatures, primordial forms, reflect the different historical, social, political and geographical contexts in which Fontana lived and worked. In this production everything is a tension between life and form, between chaos and order, between the weight of the earth and projection beyond space.

Exceptional pieces, mainly from private collections, in some cases never exhibited before, thus provide a comprehensive overview of Fontana as a sculptor of ceramics: the exhibition opens with the 'Charleston Dancer' of 1926, made in Argentina, in his hometown of Rosario, which he himself describes as his 'first ceramic', despite being made of plaster.

Whether glazed or rough, glazed, large or small, Fontana's works are a veritable explosion of life. If painting is fiction, in ceramics the artist finds reality, colour and movement. In the Portraits - from Teresita (1949) to Milena Milani (1952) to Esa (1953) - his more sentimental dimension is manifested. The female faces are both real and symbolic: ceramics, more than painting or bronze, conveys living presences, made of affection and closeness.

Lucio Fontana ad Albissola negli anni 50

In the Italy of reconstruction and economic boom, Lucio Fontana also found time to collaborate with designers and famous architects in Milan, creating ceramic friezes for building façades and sculptures for churches, schools, cinemas, hotels and sports clubs that still decorate the city today, and which are brought to life in the exhibition thanks to the powerful images of a short film specially made by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti, which is an integral part of the exhibition.

Creating in ceramics is a slow process, which requires a large number of steps: until the end, the outcome is unpredictable. In this unpredictability, Fontana carries out his experiments, plays with the material to the point of producing abstract forms.

Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale

And in fact, the exhibition closes precisely on the Spatial Concepts in Ceramic, which Fontana began to make in the late 1950s, where the clay is transformed into pure energy. The sculptor models, engraves, cuts, plunges his hands into the large spheres of clay in a sort of necessary tension. "You had to model," he would say in one of his last interviews, "and in the modelling you gave all your life, you gave all your form.

Mani-Fattura: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana, Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, until 2 March 2026