Lucio Fontana /

Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Italian-Argentinian painter and sculptor. He was mostly known as the founder of Spatialism and his ties to Arte Povera. Born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina of Italian parents, Fontana spent the first years of his life in Italy and came back to Argentina in 1905, where he stayed until 1922, working as a sculptor along with his father, and then on his own. In 1927 he returned to Italy and studied under the sculptor Adolfo Wildt, and there he presented his first exhibition in 1930, organized by the Milano art gallery Il Milione. During the following decade he journeyed Italy and France, working with abstract and expressionist painters. In 1935 he joined the association Abstraction-Création in Paris and from 1936 to 1949 made expressionnist sculptures in ceramic and bronze. In 1940 he returned to Argentina. In Buenos Aires (1946) he founded the Altamira academy together with some of his students, and made public the White Manifesto, where he states that "Matter, colour and sound in motion are the phenomena whose simultaneous development makes up the new art".