In this exclusive interview, curator Sharon Hecker unveils Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, a groundbreaking retrospective revealing the tactile, intimate side of the artist beyond his iconic slashed canvases.
Do not miss the mind-blowing Retrospective Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice until March 2nd 2026. We talked with the American, Milan-based curator Sharon Hecker, about the fascination of the ceramic work of Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), who is best known for his iconic, slashed and punctured canvases of the 1950s and ‘60s but worked in clay throughout his entire life.
There are no sculptural works by Lucio Fontana in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. How did this exhibition come about?
We discovered that the person Fontana worked with for a lifetime, the ceramist and poet Tullio d’Albisola, had a photograph with Peggy Guggenheim at the Venice Biennale, so they definitely knew each other. There was a connection that we cannot quite describe: she did not collect Fontana’s ceramics. However, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fontana’s works were collected, even though his ceramics are less well known and less appreciated. Only now are his ceramic artworks beginning to be appreciated. This is because we always know Fontana for his slashed and pocked canvases, whereas his ceramics have taken a back seat for many years. This is one reason why we wanted to present Lucio Fontana from a different perspective. The exhibition Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana invites visitors to reconsider Fontana not only as a pioneer of Spazialismo and Conceptual Art but also as a materially engaged artist deeply attuned to the tactile and expressive potential of clay. Our show points out a more intimate side of the artist and his hand’s direct engagement with the material.
Apparently, Lucio Fontana worked more than four decades in clay?
He discovered slashing canvases very late in his career, but ceramics was the first thing he did in the 1920s in Argentina and he continued to engage with the medium until the end of his career, so he worked in ceramics for 40 years, long before discovering the slash gesture. And so our idea was to think more deeply about what this material may have meant to him, so malleable, both materially and conceptually. And there has never been a museum exhibition dedicated solely to his entire ceramic production, so it seemed like a good time to do it! Indeed, for many years, ceramics were overlooked in the visual arts, relegated to the realm of craft, but in the last twenty to thirty years, ceramics have exploded on the art scene thanks to contemporary artists’ interest in experimenting with this medium. For Lucio Fontana, on the other hand, it was a noble material, like other materials such as marble and bronze, and he himself says so.
How did you structure the exhibition?
The show is organized chronologically according to all the stages of his career, and at each stage of his career he uses ceramics in a different way. So visually it’s remarkable. He moves from unglazed, raw, terracotta figures, just barely painted on the surface, to very colorful glazed figures, from figurative to abstract in the same years – Fontana is never linear in his thinking. During Fascism he worked for the Regime although we do not know exactly what his political leanings were and whether they changed over time. After World War II, he helped rebuild Milan by collaborating on projects with famous architects and designers. We commissioned a film by Argentinian director Felipe Sanguinetti and produced by Melissa Ulfane that is shown in the Peggy Guggenheim’s so called ‘Teatrino’, which is a poetic walk through Milan, showing viewers the works that we couldn’t bring to the exhibition because they are installed in theatres, churches, and private houses. So the exhibition shows his career as a ceramist, as a sculptor. Because for me, Fontana is essentially a sculptor.
When did Lucio Fontana start working with clay?
He did not start in Milan, as is usually claimed, but rather in Argentina, being an Italian and Argentine artist. In the exhibition, I emphasized the fact that Fontana said that he began working with clay after being thrown into the First World War at the age of just 17. These young men, who had no military training, saw terrible things. He was sent to one of the bloodiest battles and witnessed hand-to-hand combat, where he was injured. Full of bitterness and disillusioned, he returned to Argentina, and he admitted that the war experience was traumatic for him. It was then that Lucio Fontana decided to become an artist and began to model. He remained there for several years before returning to Italy, where he came back to study under Adolfo Wildt and began working with marble, but he wanted to stick with soft materials and continued to use them until the 1940s, even working for the fascist regime, before fleeing back to Argentina in 1940. In my opinion, he escaped because he couldn’t face another war. Fontana remained in Argentina for another seven years, where he continued to work as an art professor and also made ceramics. In the exhibition we have Argentine works that are not usually considered – it seemed important to give the viewer a look at those as well. In the end, Fontana decided to return to Italy in 1947 and remained here until his death.
It seems that Fontana went through very different decades?
Indeed, after the War he experienced the reconstruction of Italy and its economic boom in the 1950s, when he made decorated plates and crucifixes for Milanese homes, mixing the languages of art and design. Each decade has something different, and the eleven rooms of the exhibition are organized chronologically and thematically. Viewers will also see many kinds of ceramic techniques in each room, because my idea was to create an intimate encounter with the ceramics: what it means to put your hands in clay, its intense physicality, and we see how that develops most strongly at the end of his life in the Nature, rough balls of various sizes of clay where he emphasizes his fingerprints and even puts his elbows inside them in order to get a full bodily engagement with matter.
Which collectors did you work with to put together the exhibition?
Several historic pieces belong to Karsten Greve, a German collector and owner of Galerie Karsten Greve in Cologne, Sankt Moritz, Paris and formerly Milan. Others come from the Fondazione Fontana, from important Italian and European museums, as well as many private collections. There are approximately 70 significant artworks exhibited throughout various rooms. We have also works that have not left private homes since the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and some that have never been seen in public. There are also ceramics that represent animals from the 1930s, they seem as if they are coming out of the sea, and delicate butterfies and curious still lives. The enormous crocodile has become the mascot of the exhibition!
What is your favorite artwork in the show?
Aahh, this changes every day. Each work in the show has its own special history and is interesting for different reasons. The gallery that visitors seem to like quite a bit is the one with many crucifixes, which become forms of aesthetic ecstasy, each brilliantly glazed in a different way, with its own personality. One is raw terracotta, almost as if flayed and bloody, to show again that Fontana’s mind is never linear, and that ceramics have a wide range of expressive possibilities, even if Fontana was also obeying the rules of the age-old ritual of working in clay.
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