Painted in 1964–65.

Lucio Fontana’s stark white Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1964–65 belongs to his most renowned and celebrated body of work featuring his instantly recognizable tagli (cuts) produced over the course of a decade between 1958 and his death in 1968. The present painting is a testament to his long-term interest in the void — a space he exposed in his punctured and cut paintings from the postwar period. Fontana constantly sought to articulate notions of a fourth dimension, and his slashes were an attempt to visually create depth and space within a two-dimensional surface. In 1946, Fontana oversaw the publication of the Manifesto Blanco, or White Manifesto, that expressed commitment to radical experimentation and new technologies within the visual arts. Although his first cuts or tagli were executed in a casual manner, they experienced an evolution over the decade, becoming almost samurai-like. Although he executed his tagli upon different colored grounds, white remained a classical one — another great example, also from 1965, is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Toward the end of his career, Fontana increasingly experimented with spatial environments and famously installed a series of meditative white tagli mounted like religious altarpieces in a large chapel, which earned him the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 1966 Venice Biennale. Fontana’s iconoclastic gesture continuously challenged painting’s traditional role and created a site of experimentation and inquiry which went on to influence subsequent generations of artists.