LONDON.- Tornabuoni Art announced the opening of its sixth gallery, with a new space in London’s Mayfair in October 2015. In keeping with the gallery’s programme focused on Post-War and Novecento Italian art, the opening exhibition will celebrate the work of Lucio Fontana, founder of the Spatialist Movement. Featuring more than 40 iconic works by the artist, this will be the first solo show of Fontana’s work in London for almost a decade. Tornabuoni Art will be launched under the direction of Ursula Casamonti, daughter of the gallery’s founder Roberto Casamonti, who has worked closely alongside her father for 20 years.

Strategically located on Albemarle Street, the new space will be designed by Marco Casamonti, owner of Studio Archea, Florence; he is also Ursula Casamonti’s brother, making the new gallery a true family project. The gallery will feature two exhibition spaces across two floors and has prepared both a dynamic and historical programme. Forthcoming exhibitions will include a group show of Italian Masters from the 50s and 60s, an exhibition of the works of Alighiero Boetti, and the first show in London of Luca Pignatelli’s work; other shows will include solo exhibitions by Arnaldo Pomodoro and Francesca Pasquali.

The first exhibition on show at the gallery will be a solo presentation of work by Argentinian Italian artist Lucio Fontana. The Spatialist artistic movement, whose main principles were set out in the very first Manifiesto Blanco, outlined a new direction for art embracing science and technology. Fontana forged a new dimension of the flat surface, promoting the existence of new space beyond the canvas with one of the most primitive gestures in art history. This would lay the groundwork for the next twenty years of the artist’s practice.

The extraordinary body of work displayed in the exhibition will illustrate Lucio Fontana’s most celebrated series from the 1930s to his death in 1968. These works will include a stunning black and yellow painting from the Barocchi series, a beautiful white Attese, Fontana’s most emblematic gestural aesthetic as well as a very rare black velvet on wood Pietre work from 1956. Fontana’s wife was a milliner, and the artist would sometimes uses pieces of fabric that his wife, Teresita, would leave around the house. In addition to these iconic works, the exhibition will feature further important pieces such as a Teatrino, and a seminal piece, exhibited in many major museum shows of the artist, called L’Inferno, 1956. It is an extremely rare and unique work, one of only four rhomboid shaped works ever made and one of the most important of Fontana’s oeuvre.

To accompany the exhibition, the gallery will publish a hardback monograph published by Forma, Florence. The catalogue will feature essays by Enrico Crispolti, Luca Massimo Barbero and Edward Lucie-Smith.