The ovoid shape, a viscerally torn white canvas, almost a lunar surface. Not furrows, but holes, infinity passes through there. «Concetto Spaziale, La fine di Dio» by Lucio Fontana will be auctioned on November 15th, under the hammer at Sotheby’s New York. «It can be considered a masterpiece of one of the largest series that Fontana has ever executed», reveals Claudia Dwek, Sotheby’s Chairman, Contemporary Art, Europe. “These works only rarely come onto the market and are undoubtedly considered the Holy Grail for collectors of the artist and art.” The estimate: between 18 and 22 million pounds.
To give an idea of the rarity of the painting, as Artribune explains, of the 38 monumental canvases of this series, Concetto Spaziale, La fine di Dio is only one of the 5 made in white – 2 are found in two private European collections, another 2 in the permanent museum collections of the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Not only. It’s been 5 years since an example of The End of God met the market’s gaze (from the Christie’s counterpart, in a brown tone however, sold in 2018 for £16.3 million); and you have to go back to 2004, in London, to find a painting in white like the one just announced (it found a buyer at Sotheby’s, then, for £1.2 million). «All five of the highest prices achieved by Fontana at auction were achieved by masterpieces comparable to this one», specify Patrick Drahi’s maison, «including the auction record of $29.2 million».
We are between 1963 and 1964, Fontana created the series on the occasion of three fundamental exhibitions in Zurich, Milan and Paris. What influenced him, then, were the first iconic space journeys, starting with the feat of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin around the Earth, culminating in the same decade, in 1969, with the moon landing seen worldwide. And here it is the transposition onto canvas of those fluctuations in space, a string of craters, irregular punctures on the canvas – all made with bare hands. Obviously in white, the “purest, least complicated, most understandable colour”, but also “pure simplicity, pure philosophy, spatial philosophy [e] “cosmic philosophy”». At times a portal, capable of opening up worlds, of expanding space to new dimensions. «Man will become like God», he said, «he will become spirit».
Word to the experts: «Concetto spatial, La fine di Dio by Lucio Fontana», explains Kelsey Leonard, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Evening Auction, New York, «represents the extraordinary pinnacle of the spatialist movement, founded by Fontana himself in the late 1940s , and the ultimate representation of his aesthetic explorations of space. Here Fontana perfectly disseminates a network of holes, cuts and perforations across a pure white surface in a sort of meteoric storm and, in doing so, radically challenges our traditional understanding of the boundaries between painting, sculpture and even space itself.”
In its very rare milky and meteoric version, Concetto spatial is on display today and tomorrow in Milan, Palazzo Serbelloni 22, in excellent company with other Sotheby’s highlights of the season, from a Still Life by Giorgio Morandi to a 3-wide Aerei canvas by Alighiero Boetti meters. Last stop, New York, with the final outcome.