Cavallo, the dynamic, twisting animal forged in clay, is an earnest example of Lucio Fontana’s crucial ceramic contributions to art history, intrinsic to the overarching ideas that define modern art and its practices. Anticipating his later tagli and buchi, the principles for which the artist is most celebrated space, dimensionality and the gestural intervention of the artist’s hand are central to the present work. His direct and forceful manipulation of the surface prefigures the intensity of the Concetti spaziale. Rendered in a form that is suggestive of the figurative animal yet simultaneously a visceral and abstract register of the artist’s process, Cavallo displays the creative potency and material density of Fontana’s ceramic artistry.

Having commenced his sculptural career within his father’s firm, forging funerary busts from marble and gesso, in 1928 Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera training as a neo-Classical sculptor under professor Adolf Wildt. Departing, however, from Wildt’s traditional training, Fontana became heavily influenced by a group of abstract sculptors associated with the Galleria del Milione, Milan and the Paris based ‘Abstraction-Création’. In 1935, further honing his command of the medium, the artist moved to Albissola, Italy, which at the time was the heart of Italian ceramic research and production. Here, within the Atelier Mazzotti alongside Futurist ceramicist, Tulio Mazzotti, Fontana began to tackle a large group of traditional subjects including lions, warriors, saints, crucifixes, sea creatures, and other animals such as rampant horses. Greatly influenced by Mazotti’s dicta and artistic philosophy, Fontana’s output became increasingly concerned with the concept of movement and kinetica within static images. Unlike the Futurists, however, who represented the movement of life, Fontana impressed movement into his work itself, transforming his objects into something wholly organic.

In the present work, an early example of the artist’s ceramic practice, the influence of his time in Albissola is prominent, most noticeably through the brilliant tension within the surface, fueled by the artist’s desire to investigate gestural figuration in sculpture. In the years following his time at Atelier Mazzotti, Fontana gained experience at the Sèvres factory, near Paris becoming acquainted with fellow artists Constantin Brâncuși, Tristan Tzara, and Joan Miró. Fascinated by the boundless prospects of abstraction, Fontana admired the grace and elegance of Brâncuși's organic sculptures and during his time in Paris, following the creation of the present work, Fontana become known for his investigative approach to creation, paving the way for his later more abstracted creations and cementing his reputation as an ‘abstract ceramicist’, as noted by Filippo Marinetti in the 1938 Futurist manifesto, Ceramica e Aeroceramica.

Exalting Baroque artists for their liberation of space and suggestion of movement, in his ceramic practice Fontana drew great influence from sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The manipulated and gestural forms of the horse in Cavallo resonate with Fontana's 1951 Manifesto tecnico dello spazialismo, within which he expressed his desire to ‘open up art forms so as to penetrate space; to create a new dimension that ties in with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the image’ (Lucio Fontana, quoted in Jan van der Marck and Enrico Crispolti, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1974, p. 7). Ostensibly figurative, the present work challenges the density of his chosen medium, formed with distinct lightness and motion through the rounded and elegantly indeterminate rendering of the form.

Through independent sculptural works as well as collaborations with fellow artists, architects and designers, the likes of Roberto Menghi and Osvaldo Borsani, Fontana’s ceramics fuse dispersive frames of reference, drawn from contemporary strands of design, art and architecture. A precursor to Fontana’s monumental chimney for the Borsani Casa Immobiliare, Varedo, 1943, which is adorned with the artist’s distinctive battaglia motif of soldiers on horseback, the present work, through the curvilinear form of the horse, marries the figurative with the fantastical, leaving the beast suspended at the boundaries of abstraction. Through the artist’s sensitivity to the diverse qualities of clay and his formal manipulation and expression of form, Cavallo serves as a striking example of Fontana’s synthesis of the arts.