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The works gathered in this room are united by the use of "buchi", Italian for holes. The perforation of the canvas was Fontana's radical step into a new dimension of art. "The hole is my invention, and that's it. I can die after this invention," he once said.

In doing so, Fontana broke the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture. The starting point of the early "Buchi" works is the untreated white canvas or white paper mounted on canvas. Colour does not play a role in these early works. The canvases are pierced only by rhythmically arranged holes, sometimes large, sometimes small and finely placed, sometimes evenly spaced along the edges or grouped in dense clusters.

These holes and their arrangement evoke the starry sky, solar systems or galaxies and reflect Fontana's fascination with space travel and exploration. In his manifestos, Fontana described how he detached himself from the earth and the horizon line in order to create a new aesthetic: "The true conquest of space by man is the detachment from the earth. A new aesthetic emerges, luminous forms that move through space. Movement, colour, time and space are the basic concepts of the new art".

With his "buchi" works, Fontana aimed to transcend the boundaries of the earthly and of matter, and to open up cosmic space mentally. A remarkable moment came in 1952, when Fontana presented works from the "buchi" series in an experimental television programme on the Italian broadcaster RAI. These works were illuminated from behind, creating images of swirling galaxies. Even after the television broadcast, the temporary images persisted as an electromagnetic signal and continue to spread spatially to this day.