From October 11, 2025, to March 2, 2026, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection will present Manu-Facture: Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics, the first museum exhibition entirely dedicated to the artist’s ceramic production. Curated by Sharon Hecker, the show aims to bring renewed attention to a fundamental part of Fontana’s practice, broadening the critical understanding of his work beyond the iconic slashed canvases.
The exhibition brings together more than seventy ceramic works created over a span of roughly forty years, many of which are rarely shown or come from private collections. It traces Fontana’s trajectory through the medium of ceramics, from his early years in 1920s Argentina to the intense period in Albisola, and through to his later work in Milan. The exhibition highlights the artist’s ongoing tension between craft and experimentation, material and concept, gesture and form.
The title Mani-Fattura explicitly evokes both the manual and conceptual dimensions of ceramics in Fontana’s practice. These are not “minor” works, but rather an active and innovative laboratory where the artist explored fundamental themes such as the body, spirituality, violence, identity, and memory, anticipating many of the issues that would later become central in contemporary art.
The exhibition is organised into chronological-thematic sections and concludes with a group of works marking the transition toward the Nature and Spatial Concepts cycles: spherical or oval forms that are incised, broken, or cut, foreshadowing the idea of gesture as an opening into space.
The exhibition is accompanied by the short film Lucio Fontana Ceramics in Milan by Felipe Sanguinetti, documenting Fontana’s ceramic interventions in architectural contexts across Milan. The catalogue, published by Marsilio Arte, includes texts by the curator and international authors, along with an extensive selection of images.
With Mani-Fattura, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection offers a comprehensive view of an artist who traversed the twentieth century by reinventing the relationship between art and matter. Ceramics, often relegated to the margins of art history, emerges here as a tool of rupture and regeneration, fully aligned with Fontana’s radical vision.
Exhibition title: Mani-Fattura: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana
Where: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy
When: 11 October 2025 – 2 March 2026
Curator: Sharon Hecker
Website: guggenheim-venice.it
