VENICE ASTRAL PROJECTION CLINIC

11.10.25 - 02.03.26

7 December 2025

Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, is a groundbreaking exhibition and a major middle finger to average gallerist who urges you to keep producing the product that sells. The exhibition itself reveals a lesser-known side of the artist, presenting over seventy experimental ceramic works that deviate entirely from Fontana’s magnum opus, his “slash” paintings, that have casted a shadow over his remaining bodies of work.

Fontana once stated: "Between suicide and travel, I chose the latter because I hope to still make a series of ceramics and sculptures that give me the pleasure or feeling of still being a living man." Clay provided him with both escape and rebirth, as it combined the immediacy of touch with the philosophical depth that he would later carve into space itself.

The exhibition's title, Manu-Facture, reflects Fontana's dual commitment to hand and form. His cooperation with architects and artisans resulted in everything from crucifixes and door handles to massive friezes on Milanese facades. A newly commissioned short film by Argentinian director Felipe Sanguinetti takes the story outside the exhibition, chronicling the artist's lasting impact on the city's architecture. Fontana's ceramics, which have long been linked with craft rather than fine art, are gaining attention as the medium regains popularity in contemporary art. The exhibition's curation repositions these pieces as critical experiments in material and gesture, rather as decorative diversions.

Visitors follow a rhythmic evolution from the Portrait of Teresita (1949) and the shimmering Crocodile (1936-37) to the savage grace of Concetto spaziale, Natura (1959-60), in which clay serves as the theater for Fontana's characteristic incisions. The artist's touch literally leaves its mark in the form of fingerprints, gashes, and openings, as if to emphasize that contact shapes life itself. Manu-Facture asks us to reconsider Fontana as more than just the founder of Spatialism, but also as a maker deeply entrenched in the ancient alchemy of clay, where gesture meets substance and clay emerges as a vessel for life-affirming experimentation, multiplicity, and generativity.