Spazialismo, a group exhibition that examines Lucio Fontana's concepts in the 1940s and 50s about how we consider structures of space in the modern,yet natural, world.
The exhibit is also intended to serve as a vehicle for contemporary review of
Spatialist texts - such as "Manifesto Blanco" (1946), "Movinetto Spazialle"(1948), "Manifesto tecnico
della Spazialismo" (1951) and the enthusiastic "Television Manifesto" (1952).
In 1946 Fontana founded the Academia Altamira in Buenos Aries.
An avant-garde art school, its aim
was to promote the idea that a new art was necessary to reflect the modern world as revealed by
science. Aligned with the Baroque tradition of depicting dynamic spaces of plastic movement,
Fontana's ideas were also concerned with phenomenology and continued dimensional discovery of
Nature, of which man is a part.
Gathering the voices of five contemporary artists - Mel Bochner, R. Luke DuBois, Michael Joaquin
Grey, Yael Kanarek and Matthew Ritchie - the exhibition focuses on expanded representations of
space and dynamic movement. Also included will be photographic documentation of Fontana's 1951
illuminated arabesque for La Triennale di Milano - an early use of neon installation in an arts context.
The triumph of film... is a definitive evidence of the direction that the spirit has taken toward the
dynamic. In praise of this transformation in the nature of man, we abandon the use of the known
forms of art and move toward development of an art based upon the unity of space and time.
Movement - the property of evolution and development - is the basic condition of matter. Matter
exists in movement and in no other form; its development is eternal. The simultaneous
development of the phenomena of color and sound are what integrate the new art. The
subconscious - which houses all of the images perceived by intelligence - adopts the essence
and the form of these images and accepts notions that give form to the nature of man. The
subconscious shapes, completes, and transforms the individual. It gives him the orientation that
he received from the world and that the individual adopts when necessary. Society tends to
suppress the separation of these two forces in order to unite them into a single and greater form;
modern science bases itself upon the progressive unification of its branches. This new state of
consciousness gives rise to an integral art in which being functions and manifests itself in its
totality.
-excerpted from "Technical Manifesto of Spatialism" by Lucio Fontana on the occasion
of an international meeting on Dimensions held at the IXth Milan Triennale in 1951
For images and more information on the exhibition please visit:
www.bitforms.com 
