Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) was an Argentine-Italian artist whose radical experiments with space transformed postwar painting and sculpture. Born in Rosario, Argentina, to Italian parents, Fontana spent much of his life between Argentina and Italy. He trained as a sculptor at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and worked throughout his career in sculpture, ceramics, painting and installation. In the late 1940s, Fontana became a leading figure in Spatialism, an artistic movement that sought to move beyond traditional painting and sculpture by incorporating space, movement, light and new technologies. Beginning in 1949, he punctured canvases with holes and later developed his celebrated tagli, or “cuts,” slicing through monochromatic canvases to expose the space behind them. He called these works Concetti spaziali (“Spatial Concepts”). Rather than treating the canvas as a flat surface on which to create an illusion of space, Fontana made actual space part of the artwork.