In the summer of 1959, Lucio Fontana began work on a series of ceramics he called 'Nature' (plural of 'Natura'). These rough, spherical sculptures were later cast in bronze. Fontana cut lumps of clay like fruits and marked the cut surfaces with fine incisions. Over time he began to pierce the spheres with a wooden stick, making deep slits or holes in the surface that extended into the interior of the sculptures. In this way, Fontana transferred the gesture of cutting and perforating to the medium of bronze sculpture.
Nature was first exhibited in 1960 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice under the title 'Dalla natura all'arte' ('From Nature to Art'), although at the time Fontana still referred to his round spatial sculptures as 'balloons'. A year later, the works were exhibited at the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and elsewhere. The art historian Giovanni Lista (*1943) refers to Fontana's fascination with space exploration in terms of "asteroids crashing into the earth". The crater-strewn surface of Nature is reminiscent of the moon or meteorites. At the same time, they can be read as plump, opening plant buds - symbols of growth and blossoming - or walnuts as a sign of fertility.
With the "Nature" series, Fontana extended his formal explorations: Building on his work with ceramics in Albisola in the 1930s, he transferred his spatial concept to the medium of bronze sculpture: Fontana opened up the space of the spheres through the cuts - on the one hand, he created a protected inner sphere; on the other, the round bodies burst outwards, conquering the surrounding space.
