FINE ART CATALOGUE

Designed for Nahmad Projects to accompany their exhibition of Lucio Fontana's Teatrini. Fontana's, I Teatrini or ‘Little Theatres’ are a series of the artist's lesser know works. Unlike his slashed canvasses, these works use multiple textures and layers. Created in the mid 1960s Lucio Fontana considered this series the culmination of his ‘Spatial Concepts’ – artworks designed to affect the viewer’s perception of space within the work and beyond. The Teatrini also bear witness to the world around the artist, with playful allusions to the first spacewalk in 1965 embedded in punctures walking across canvas like footsteps in the sky. 

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I wanted to design an object that reflected the exhibited works, the era in which they were created that payed homage Fontana’s ‘Spatial Concepts’. The cover is in a physical interpretation of a Teatrini – using paper, foil blocking and blind debossing to create depth and texture with black edge painting to mimic the way the frames of the Teatrini work. This creates an object that feels 'total', a little surreal and like it might have dropped out of the vortex of space. The layout is a modern, minimal interpretation of mid-century modern, using negative space to create tension and rhythm and picking out the puncture marks as a motif to create detail and narrative within the text. The puncture marks were also of thematic importance to Nahmad Projects as part of Fontana’s interest in early space exploration.