Mazzoleni at Frieze Seoul 2024

Following the inaugural exhibition at Sorol Art Museum, South Korea, of Lucio Fontana’s work, works by Fontana will be presented in dialogue with that of Fausto Melotti. This dialogue engages with the friendship between Fontana and Melotti which began in 1928 when they were both students at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, under the mentorship of the sculptor Adolfo Wildt. The pair remained friends, sharing practical and creative support and thus their engagement with space and geometry is intertwined. Fontana’s cuts pierce the surface, opening a new dimension behind the canvas, which is both a real space, liberated by the cut, and a transcendent one, accessed by the imagination. Melotti’s sculptures, on the other hand, respond to movement and vibration, creating new spaces through interactions with their given environment.

Inspired by the work of Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani continued the exploration into transcending conventional concepts of painting. Each work by Bonalumi is born out of a dialogue of internal pressures and external resistance with which the surface of the canvas opposes. Blu (1979) exemplifies some of Bonalumi’s most notable shaped canvases, which through the intricate placement of “ribs” to the reverse of the canvas, extend into the third dimension, invading the viewer’s space. Like Bonalumi, Castellani’s work is focused on the sculptural aspects of constructing a painting and its transformation from a monochromatic two-dimensional surface to physical object.