Lucio Fontana

Do you have a piece by Lucio Fontana in your possession and would like to know its value? Our Experts will carry out a free appraisal of your piece, provide you with an estimate of the market price, and then help you to sell at the best possible price.

Status, estimation and price of the artist Lucio Fontana

Price of a painting by the artist: 40,000 – 2,000,000 €.

Price of a drawing by the artist: 2,800 – 38,000 €.

Price of an artist’s print: 300 – 4,500 €.

Price of a sculpture: 17,000 – 1,000,000 €.

If you would like to have a work by Fontana appraised, our experts will take care of everything.

The youth of Lucio Fontana

Lucio Fontana was born in Argentina on 19 February 1899 and died on 7 September 1968 near Varese in Italy. He spent part of his childhood in Italy before returning to Argentina where he worked as a sculptor.

In 1927, he studied sculpture with Adolfo Wildt. In 1930 he organised his first exhibition in Milan at the “II Milion” gallery. During this time he became one of the first Italian painters to make abstract art thanks to his travels and encounters with expressionist and abstract artists. In 1935, he joined the Abstraction-Creation association in Paris. He experimented with ceramics, producing sets of figurative sculptures.

Lucio Fontana and Spatialism

He will return to Buenos Aires where he will teach for several years. Lucio Fontana will develop the “ manifeste blanc ” with other artists in 1946. He experimented with several mediums and techniques throughout his career, he was fascinated by the exploration of space, time and the Italian futurist movement. He will be especially famous for his torn canvases. He deliberately creates tears in his monochrome works to symbolize the passage of time. He then wrote texts to explain his desecrating gesture and through this, he developed Spatialisms. He called this production “Spatial Concepts”. For this, he would lacerate several sculptures and ceramics.

He experimented with cuts and slits in different forms until the end of his life, using different materials, different colours, etc.

After his death, several major retrospective exhibitions paid tribute to Fontana, including one organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 2014. He was attached to informal art, and paradoxically he names his paintings in Italian whereas his mother tongue is Spanish.

Recognising Lucio Fontana’s signature

Like many artists, Fontana did not sign all of his works. However, you will find below an example of the signatures to give you an idea. Variations of these signatures do exist, do not hesitate to contact one of our experts to formally authenticate a signature.

Appraising and selling a piece by Lucio Fontana

If you own a piece by Lucio Fontana or any other object, ask for a free estimate via our online form.

You will then be contacted by a member of our team of experts and auctioneers to give you an independent view of the market price of your piece. In the context of a possible sale, our specialists will also advise you on the different options available to sell your work at the best price.