Rock / Paper / Scissors

Lucio Fontana’s stark white Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1964–65 belongs to his most renowned and celebrated body of work featuring his instantly recognizable tagli (cuts) produced over the course of a decade between 1958 and his death in 1968. The present painting is a testament to his long-term interest in the void — a space he exposed in his punctured and cut paintings from the postwar period. Fontana constantly sought to articulate notions of a fourth dimension, and his slashes were an attempt to visually create depth and space within a two-dimensional surface. In 1946, Fontana oversaw the publication of the Manifesto Blanco, or White Manifesto, that expressed commitment to radical experimentation and new technologies within the visual arts. Although his first cuts or tagli were executed in a casual manner, they experienced an evolution over the decade, becoming almost samurai-like. Although he executed his tagli upon different colored grounds, white remained a classical one — another great example, also from 1965, is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Toward the end of his career, Fontana increasingly experimented with spatial environments and famously installed a series of meditative white tagli mounted like religious altarpieces in a large chapel, which earned him the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Fontana’s iconoclastic gesture continuously challenged painting’s traditional role and created a site of experimentation and inquiry which went on to influence subsequent generations of artists.

PRICE ON REQUEST

Alexander Calder is internationally known for his mobiles and monumental commissions, which have become some of the most iconic artworks of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, as he was working on his monumental works, Calder simultaneously returned to his modest practice of creating birds from tin cans and wire, akin to the works from his Cirque Calder, 1926–31. Similarly to his mobiles, these birds were constructed to be hung from the ceiling, interacting with the movement of the air. Influenced by the Dadaists, Calder created Bird out of found materials from his studio — here, a tin can. The construction of the work is directly inspired by a scene Calder witnessed in Paris while strolling along the Seine: he saw “birds with long slender tails and a red disk about two inches in diameter on the end” [1].

Created with the same skill, craft, and detail of his larger mobiles, Bird condenses the artist’s tenets into a more accessible and familiar composition. After gaining notoriety from his 1946 exhibition at Galerie Louis Carré in Paris and Jean-Paul Sartre’s subsequent seminal essay, Calder went on to represent the United States at the 1952 Venice Biennale. With this fame came various public commissions, including Spirale for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 1958. Juxtaposed to his public monumental works, Bird brings Calder’s mastery down to a domestic scale.

[1] ‘Only, Only Bird’ in The Phillips Collection, n.d., https://www.phillipscollection.org/collection/only-only-bird (Accessed October 30, 2023)

“The spirit, Chinese mountains seen in mist, as shadow, as setting for a distant trip—the different moods of nature were in my thoughts.”

— Isamu Noguchi [1]

Rain Mountain belongs to a series within Isamu Noguchi’s (1904–1988) mature oeuvre that focuses on mountain forms, topography and other natural phenomena. Immersing himself within nature was at the heart of Noguchi’s work since the beginning of his career: in applying for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1927, Noguchi wrote, “It is my desire to view nature through nature’s eyes, and to ignore man as an object for special veneration... Indeed, a fine balance of spirit with matter can only concur when the artist has so thoroughly submerged himself in the study of the unity of nature as to truly become once more part of nature.” [2] This desire permeated his work up until the last decade of his life, when Noguchi began this steel-mountain series. In the spring of 1982, he sent fabricator Peter Carlson twenty-six Styrofoam sculptures to be realized in hot-dipped galvanized steel. Noguchi was famous for experimenting with various mediums throughout his career, and this was his first foray into galvanized steel. He saw the fabrication of the sculpture as a way of provoking nature, proclaiming , “[the] Industrial process has its own secret nature—its own entropy, its own cycle of birth and dissolution.” [3]

[1] https://www.noguchi.org/artworks/collection/view/rain-mountain/

[2] D. Apostolos-Cappadona and B. Altshuler, eds., Isamu Noguchi: Essays and Conversations, New York, 1994, p. 16