Lucio Fontana once said, “Painted canvas and standing plaster figures no longer have any reason to exist. What is needed is a change in both essence and form. What is needed is the supercession of painting, sculpture, poetry, and music. It is necessary to have an art that is in greater harmony with the needs of the new spirit.” Though many know Fontana for his cutting-edge with a canvas, many don’t know that his first works in the 1920s were, in fact, figurative sculptures. It wasn’t until postwar advances in technology and science, coupled with Fontana’s interest in Spatialism, that he began thinking in terms of abstraction and experiment. This tidy retrospective traces Fontana’s evolution from traditional beginnings to his incomparable “Concetti spaziali” (Spatial Concepts). —E.C.