Christie’s will offer Lucio Fontana’s 1961 Concetto Spaziale, Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco with a €5.5m–€7.5m estimate after more than four decades in one family collection.
Christie’s will offer Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco in its 22 October Paris Evening Sale including Thinking Italian. Executed in 1961 and estimated at €5.5 million to €7.5 million, the work comes from Fontana’s celebrated Venezia series and has remained in the same family collection for more than four decades.
A Venice painting rarely seen in public
The work was acquired by Italian collector Paolo Marinotti and has descended through the family rather than circulating repeatedly through the market. Christie’s says it has been publicly exhibited only three times, including major presentations at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
That restrained exhibition and ownership history gives collectors an unusually clear provenance narrative. A major work that has not appeared repeatedly at auction can carry a different kind of market interest because its return feels like an event rather than another transaction.
Gold translates the light of St Mark's into matter
Fontana used a luminous yellow surface and a radiant golden ring to evoke the mosaics and midday light of Piazza San Marco. His signature perforations turn the surface into something more physical than a conventional painted image, pushing the work between painting, sculpture and spatial experiment.
The effect is intentionally less descriptive than a view of Venice in the traditional sense. Fontana reduces the city to light, material and gesture, allowing the surface to change as the viewer moves and as illumination shifts around it.
The Venezia series marked a turning point
Mezzogiorno in Piazza S. Marco is one of 22 works in Fontana’s Venezia series, each connecting his spatial research with specific places and atmospheric conditions in the city. The series introduced richer colour, texture and materiality into ideas he had already explored through the better-known Attese works.
For collectors, that places the painting within a tightly defined and historically important group rather than as an isolated experiment. Its subject also gives it an immediate cultural reference point that can make Fontana’s radical spatial language more accessible without reducing its significance.
The estimate reaches €7.5 million
Christie’s has placed the work at €5.5 million to €7.5 million ahead of the 22 October sale. The painting is due to lead the Thinking Italian section, with a pre-sale presentation in Milan before moving into the Paris auction programme.
Estimate ranges are not guarantees of outcome, but they show how the auction house is positioning the work relative to Fontana’s market and recent demand for major post-war Italian art. The result will provide another data point for collectors watching trophy-quality works with long private provenance.
Official sources: press.christies.com.
Source
press.christies.com