MILAN.- Thaddaeus Ropac Milan will open on 20 September 2025 with an exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana, retracing Baselitz’s longstanding and ongoing engagement with the work of the Argentine-Italian master. Entitled L’aurora viene, the Milan gallery’s inaugural exhibition pairs the two artists in dialogue in a two- person presentation for the first time, and encompasses paintings and sculptures by Baselitz spanning the past decade, as well as works by Fontana from the 1930s to the 1960s, including the loan of a nucleus of works from the Fondazione Lucio Fontana.

Though the two artists never met, Fontana has played an important role in the work of Baselitz. Baselitz has a studio in Italy, and Fontana lived and worked for most of his life in Milan, where the first exhibition of his works was held in 1931.

The exhibited works by Baselitz include a new monumental bronze sculpture and recent paintings with empty, unlit centres or suspended figures who seem to surge forth from dark grounds, echoing Fontana’s exploration of what lies beyond the canvas.

Demonstrating the development and evolution of this exploration in Fontana’s work, the works on view include ‘Baroque’ sculptures dating from as early as 1937 up to the 1950s, as well as a selection of Concetti spaziali (Spatial Concepts), including iconic Attese (Expectations) works from the 1960s and key examples from the Gessi (Impastos, 1954–58) and Inchiostri (Inks, 1956–59) series, as well as an exceptionally rare Fine di Dio (End of God) from 1963–64. The gallery’s new Milan space, in the historic Palazzo Belgioioso, designed by Giuseppe Piermarini in 1772, becomes the site for an ‘intellectual confrontation’ between the two artists’ works, which unfolds across ideas of space, language, objecthood and the body, and, fundamentally, a search for origination, both of artistic form and of the universe. ‘Interpretation is of no use to any artist’, Baselitz explains. ‘Now, at my age, it’s more of an intellectual confrontation, without any dependence.’

The presentation of works by Lucio Fontana alongside paintings by Georg Baselitz sets up a dialogue that is both coherent and surprising. Allowing for an in-depth exploration of the ideas artmaking is founded on, it showcases a shared imagination and sensibility, expressed through different means. The project demonstrates how alive and relevant Fontana’s work remains today. The works by Baselitz exhibited in Milan – some of which even reference Fontana in their titles – have been extraordinary allies in this regard. Our loan of a core group of works, carefully selected from our collection and including pieces from lesser-known and yet intensely meaningful cycles, is a valuable opportunity that resonates with the commitments behind, and builds on, our multifaceted programme.

— Silvia Ardemagni, President of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana

Baselitz’s recent portraits of spectral figures in pallid colours, hanging upside-down in the pictorial space, were inspired by a dream in which he saw his own skin ‘torn down the middle, split in two’. Over the course of the last decade, he has returned almost compulsively to the motif. His light, sometimes effervescent treatment of paint suggests the ageing body, while its composition – emerging onto the monochrome ground as if from behind – recalls Fontana’s ploughing of the depths of the canvas in search of a new artistic dimension. ‘I wanted an apparition’, Baselitz says, ‘something that appears out of the depth’. As critic Steven Henry Madoff wrote: ‘There is a hiss in these late paintings, whose provenance is in what Achille Bonito Oliva once called “a splintered, pyrotechnic space,” which presents a formal spatiality that is also psychological’.

In the evolution of Baselitz’s new spatiality, as Fabrizio Gazzarri wrote, ‘a progressive liberation is taking place that jettisons all oppressive and excessive matter [...]. In this removal of matter, gravity loses direction; the compositional structures break down, taking on a new order that obeys other laws, other potential (cosmic?) dimensions.’ There is a tangible parallel here with the new laws and dimensions that Fontana, before him, had established in his manifestos spanning the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which he formulated his theories of Spatialism. Fontana believed that in order to make a ‘new art’ in keeping with its time – ‘an art for the Space Age’, as he put it – he needed to open the canvas to the infinite cosmos beyond it. In the resulting Concetti spaziali, he achieved this by puncturing or cutting: from the Attese works, with their characteristic tagli, or slashes, that plunge deep into the canvas, to the Gessi, made using pastel, and Inchiostri, so named for the artist’s use of ink, which are united by the constellations of buchi (holes) that perforate canvases rendered in muted tones.

The dark centres of the earliest Baselitz works on view – a series commenced in 2015 in a period of intense reflection on the work of Fontana – reference the latter’s tagli. A work from this series, Aurora viene (Aurora comes, 2015), gives its cosmic title, evoking an infinite dimension beyond the canvas, to the exhibition. These depictions of legs, which conclude at the extremities of the canvas in clunky shoes, draw the eye to its empty centre: ‘like a dark opening’, as art historian Carla Schulz-Hoffmann described. From there, Baselitz wrote: ‘It should flow out, spread out, expand towards the edges’. This central abyss, which represents a break with both Baselitz’s previous compositions and with art-historical norms, is the fruit of his reflection on Fontana. As Baselitz explained: ‘He cuts a slit in the middle of his canvas and plunges the viewer’s gaze into darkness. [...] The artist has something very specific in mind, which lies outside the painting. This slit has a meaning, just like in Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. The slit is like a view of the sky, of eternity.’

Also on view is a remarkable example of Fontana’s rare Fine di Dio (End of God) works. Widely considered the apex of his practice, the artist made only 38 Fine di Dio works in a brief period between 1963 and 1964. Its ovular form represents both origin and absolute; as Fontana put it, ‘infinity, the inconceivable, the end of figuration, the beginning of nothingness’.

Exhibited in the principal gallery room of Thaddaeus Ropac Milan, the Fine di Dio in arresting pink enters into conversation with Baselitz’s 2019 Rosa Riposa, with its unfurling nude figures rendered in a similarly sensuous palette. In the tagli and the organic shapes found in Fontana’s works from the 1950s, too, a suggestion of form and matter, bearing both their philosophical and physical meanings, emerges when confronted with the disarming corporeal intimacy of Baselitz’s bodies laid bare.

Fontana’s and Baselitz’s pursuits have in common a sense that apparent destruction can bring renewal. Whispers of this can be found in the earliest Fontana works on view in the exhibition: sculptures which attest to his work before the concretisation of his theory of Spatialism. Here, the artist was already oscillating between abstraction and f iguration, and between referentiality and experimentation: each work a daring act of ‘persiflage’, as Baselitz described. Then came the conclusive gesture of the puncture. For Baselitz, when he first encountered Fontana’s work in Berlin in the early 1960s, as artists were talking about the end of painting, ‘the black in the cut leff open a glimmer of hope’; ‘hope that, in the middle, there might be something affer all.’ Baselitz began painting his compositions upside-down in 1969. This novel format was his route to revolutionising a medium that was then regarded as irredeemably conventional. He describes being fascinated by the content in Fontana’s work because it ‘is inconceivable without form’, while Baselitz’s inversion, present across the works on view in the exhibition, serves to empty ostensibly figurative form of its content. As Flavia Frigeri wrote in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, it is in their ‘making the object of painting prevail over the painted subject’ that the two artists meet.

Baselitz often approaches giving his works titles as an opportunity for wordplay, sometimes denoting a reference or idea, and sometimes representing a snippet of everyday conversation. Fontana is named, by pun or play on words, in several of the titles of works on view. Fontana himself offen inscribed enigmatic phrases on the versos of his works, like a diary of thoughts ranging from the philosophical to the mundane: ‘a domestic and poetic counterpoint to the gesture that silently cuts the canvas’, as Luca Massimo Barbero wrote in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, which Baselitz transforms ‘into titles, into a further sound’. Baselitz is an autodidact in Fontana’s language, entering into an encrypted linguistic play that, in Frigeri’s words, ‘shroud[s] this imaginary friendship in a veil of humour and mystery’.

Baselitz and Fontana seem to interact and converse at several levels across the exhibition, but Barbero posits that the two artists, ultimately, are bound not by ‘a formal proximity nor an affinity of language, but a shared tension. In other words, the idea that art does not represent but announces, that it does not describe but evokes, that it is first and foremost an act of opening up towards the origin.’ Brought together, they enter into a dialogue that activates the latent sense of the union of the cosmic and the bodily that lies just under the surface in both artists’ works, centred around the infinite dark matter they both explore. The slash was the aurora of Baselitz’s engagement with Fontana: a starting point for a dialogue that runs much deeper. As Barbero added: ‘It is there, in that slit, that Baselitz was able to see art become the threshold between sound and vision, between flesh and space and, finally, between gesture and beginning’: a birth of form that is ‘not given but originates’.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Flavia Frigeri, Curatorial and Collections Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Luca Massimo Barbero, Artistic Advisor of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and leading Fontana scholar.