Lucio Fontana. Un Futuro c’è stato. There was indeed a future.
June 22 – November 3, 2024
Musée Soulages, Rodez
This summer, the Musée Soulages, Rodez, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou and Tornabuoni Art presents the first comprehensive survey in France of Lucio Fontana’s work in a decade: Lucio Fontana. There Was Indeed a Future – Un Futuro c’è stato. Including eleven works from the gallery’s collection, the exhibition showcases the breadth and depth of Fontana’s revolutionary oeuvre.
Born from a 2020 conversation between the museum’s director and the now late Master, Pierre Soulages, the exhibition offers an invaluable opportunity to compare the work of two groundbreaking artists, who despite their differences, admired each other and shared a profound interest in the relationship between time and space.
“We could talk about the future thirty years ago, even today we cannot say what the future will be… But in these forty years of my activity … I see that there has indeed been a future.”
Lucio Fontana interviewed byCarla Lonzi in 1967
The exhibition, curated by Paolo Campiglio and Benoît Decron, is based on the concept of the intuition of the future in Lucio Fontana’s work and the renewal of the status of art. It presents a unique journey centered around a dialectic between material and immaterial, and the concept of utopia, which presupposes a contradictory relationship of attraction and repulsion to concrete reality. Sculptures, works on canvas and paper, environments—over eighty works are exhibited together for the first time. They are divided into three closely related axes: Matter-Light-Color (nature and figure, anti-nature and anti-figure), Active Space (Environments and Teatrini) and Utopia (Concetti Spaziali and Fine di Dio).
This is the first major survey of Fontana’s work in France in a decade. It follows the retrospectives at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou in 1987 and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2014. The Musée Soulages explores Fontana’s body of work before and after the War, in Argentina and Italy, showcasing the diversity of his creative output: from paintings and papers, to sculptures and ceramics, as well as light and space installations.
Tornabuoni Art is one of the exhibition’s two main partners along with the Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne, which has loaned 27 works to the Musée Soulages. Other lenders include the Musée des Abattoirs,Toulouse; Musée de Grenoble and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, as well as public institutions in Italy and Switzerland. The Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan, has been instrumental in facilitating rare and prestigious loans, as well as providing invaluable scholarly support.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog edited by Paolo Campiglio.
How to get there
Musée Soulages, Rodez, France
Until August 31: Monday to Sunday: 10am – 6pm
From September 1: Tuesday to Friday : 10am – 1pm / 2pm – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday : 10am – 6pm
Closed November 1, 2024.
