Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana
Catch this first-time show of the artist’s works in clay at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice through 2 March 2026
Manu-Facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, offers a timely and quietly radical reframing of one of the 20th century’s most mythologized artists. Open through 2 March 2026, the exhibition decisively moves beyond Fontana’s slashed canvases, focusing on his decades-long engagement with clay. Bringing together roughly 70 ceramic works and sculptural objects, many rarely shown publicly, the exhibition traces Fontana’s work in ceramics from the 1920s through the postwar years, positioning the medium not as a side pursuit but as a core platform for his art, ripe with experimentation, tactility, and spatial thinking.
Installed within Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo on the Grand Canal, the show unfolds across figurative pieces, abstract forms, and hybrid objects blurring the boundaries between fine art, craft, and architectural ornament. Curated by Sharon Hecker, the exhibition underscores how clay allowed Fontana to push volume, surface and gesture in ways that directly informed his later Spatialist breakthroughs. Supplemented by talks, films, and contextual materials examining his architectural ceramics, Manu-Facture ultimately reframes Fontana as an artist whose radical vision was as much shaped by the kiln as by the blade.
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venice, Italy
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