Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio (1963–4) will be featured in Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale next month in New York with an estimate in the range of $20–30 million. The work is part of a groundbreaking 1960s series of 38 “La fine di Dio” paintings, in which the artist embarked on an exploration of space that would become a formative chapter in his career.
“This is Lucio Fontana at his finest,” said David Galperin, the auction house’s head of contemporary art. “Dazzling like the sun itself, the painting is the ultimate testament to the artist’s decades-long fascination with depth, light, and space. Just as the impact of the Second World War and the atomic bomb broke open a new language for Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, the advent of space exploration, ushered in by Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, became the catalyst for opening a new dimension of painting with Fontana’s ‘La fine di Dio’ series.”
This work is one of four yellow works from the series and comes from the collection of Texas art patrons Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. Its appearance at auction next month will mark the first time a yellow work from the series has come under the hammer since 2015 when one set the artist’s current auction record of $29.2 million.
