In the second half of the 20th century space and time become significant artistic themes. This also fundamentally changes the idea of what art is, what it can be made from and the forms it can take. Lucio Fontana’s artistic practice exemplifies this in many ways.
Two particularly striking positions are taken by the American Alexander Calder and the Briton Richard Long. Calder is Fontana’s contemporary; Long is almost 50 years younger. While Long emphasises the relationship of sculpture to the earth, and uses rough-looking stones, Calder detaches it from the ground and makes it appear weightless. Long’s work is an experience of space in its expanding concentric circles on the ground. Calder’s mobile floating beneath the ceiling is evidence of how space is determined by movement in time.
The medium of the painting also takes on new form, as exemplified by Gotthard Graubner and Erinna König, who both owe much artistically to Fontana. Graubner transforms the painting into a sculptural body, liberating the spatial energies of paint in a new way. He logically calls his works ‘colour-space bodies’. König, however, works with found materials. She frames a reinforcing steel mesh so that part of it projects into real space, for example. And on this part she stretches a piece of patterned fabric that looks like a section of the starry sky.
