"Lucio Fontana’s respect for the advancements of science and technology during the 20th century led him to approach his art as a series of investigations into a wide variety of mediums and methods. As a sculptor, he experimented with stone, metals, ceramics, and neon; as a painter he attempted to transcend the confines of the two-dimensional surface. In a series of manifestos originating with the “Manifesto blanco” (White manifesto, 1946), Fontana announced his goals for a “spatialist” art, one that could engage technology to achieve an expression of the fourth dimension. He wanted to meld the categories of architecture, sculpture, and painting to create a groundbreaking new aesthetic idiom.

From 1947 on, Fontana’s experiments were often entitled Concetti spaziali (Spatial concepts), among which a progression of categories unfolds. The artist’s polychrome sculptures brought color, considered to be under the dominion of painting, into the realm of the three-dimensional. In his buchi (holes) cycle, begun in 1949, he punctured the surface of his canvases, breaking the membrane of two-dimensionality in order to highlight the space behind the picture...From 1958, Fontana purified his paintings by creating matte, monochrome surfaces, thus focusing the viewer’s attention on the slices that rend the skin of the canvas." (Jennifer Blessing, Guggenheim Online)

Prints such as the present Concetto spaziale are among these Tagli (cuts, 1958–68), whose violent jags enforce the idea that the work is an object, not solely a surface.