Spatialism

Movimento spaziale or Spazialismo was an Italian art movement founded by the Argentinian-born artist Lucio Fontana, along with a small group of his students, in 1947. Announcing their aspirations in the form of a manifesto—the “Manifesto Blanco,” or white manifesto—the students, under Fontana’s direction, called for new art forms that embraced the latest scientific concepts derived from modern physics. Taking inspiration from the Futurists’ fascination with technology, they advocated for abandoning painting in order to develop an art suitable for the mechanical age, one “based on the unity of space and time.” In Fontana’s infamous “Concetto spaziale” series, the canvases’ stigmata-like lacerations represent the artist’s attempt to articulate Spatialist concepts by transforming a two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional space.