Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold opened at the Met Breuer and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Avenue, running from January 23 to April 14 before traveling to Guggenheim Bilbao. The exhibition was the first major American retrospective of Fontana after his death, reconsidering him not only through the famous slashed and punctured Concetto spaziale canvases, but also through ceramics, sculpture, environments, and spatial experiments. Curated around Fontana's lifelong attempt to move beyond the flat picture plane, the show reframed Spatialism as an interdisciplinary response to architecture, technology, light, and postwar ideas of space. Its placement at the Met Breuer also mattered as one of the museum's late major modern-art projects in Marcel Breuer's building.
The retrospective broadened U.S. understanding of Fontana beyond the cut canvas and reasserted Spatialism's place in postwar art.
