Italian
At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the first exhibition entirely dedicated to the artist’s ceramic works
VENICE – Currently on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the exhibition Mani-Fattura: Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics, curated by art historian Sharon Hecker. The show, which opened on October 11 and runs until March 2, 2026, is the first museum exhibition entirely devoted to Fontana’s ceramic production, featuring around seventy works from public and private collections, some of which have never been exhibited before.
“This exhibition,” emphasized Director Karole P. B. Vail, “offers an unprecedented insight into the artist’s vital relationship with clay, a material that accompanied him throughout his life.”
Curator Hecker explained how ceramics reveal a more intimate and tactile side of Fontana, far from the heroic image of his famous slashes: “Clay,” she stated, “emerges as a tool for experimentation and creative freedom, restoring to this medium the role it deserves alongside marble and bronze.”
The exhibition spans four decades and two continents, from his first stay in Argentina in the 1920s to his return to Fascist Italy, through to the post-war period and his dialogue with Milanese design and architecture. The show brings together figurative works—women, sea creatures, harlequins, warriors—and abstract sculptures, along with everyday objects and decorative pieces for public and private buildings.
Enriching the exhibition is the previously unseen short film Le ceramiche di Lucio Fontana a Milano by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti, which documents the artist’s site-specific interventions made in collaboration with architects such as Osvaldo Borsani and Marco Zanuso.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Marsilio Arte, featuring essays by international scholars, and a program of free collateral activities made possible by the support of the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti. The initiative is also supported by Bottega Veneta.
With Mani-Fattura, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection invites the public to rediscover Fontana as a sculptor deeply connected to material, capable of transforming the humility of clay into a universal artistic language.
