Georg Baselitz & Lucio Fontana L’aurora viene

Thaddaeus Ropac Milan will open on 20 September 2025 with an exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana, retracing Baselitz's longstanding and ongoing engagement with the work of the Argentine-Italian master. The Milan gallery's inaugural exhibition is a dialogue between Baselitz and Fontana, with loans from the Baselitz studio and the loan of a nucleus of works from the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Fontana has played an important role in the work of Baselitz, who also has a studio in Italy, and Fontana lived and worked for most of his life in Milan, where the first exhibition of his works was held in 1931.

The gallery's new Milan space in the Palazzo Belgioioso becomes the site for an unfolding 'intellectual confrontation' between the two artists' works. 'Interpretation is of no use to any artist', Baselitz explains. 'Now, at my age, it's more of an intellectual confrontation, without any dependence.' The exhibited works by Baselitz bridge the past decade, and include a new monumental bronze sculpture and a recent series of portraits whose suspended figures 'appear out of the depth', echoing Fontana's exploration of what lies beyond the canvas. The dark centres of the earliest Baselitz works on view - a series commenced in 2015 in a period of intense reflection on the work of Fontana - reference the latter's groundbreaking tagli, or slashes. A work from this series, Aurora viene (Aurora comes, 2015), gives its cosmic title, evoking an infinite dimension beyond the canvas, to the exhibition. 

The Fontana works on view in the exhibition include 'Baroque' sculptures dating from as early as 1937 up to the 1950s, as well as a selection of Concetti spaziali (Spatial concepts) from the 1950s and 60s, attesting to his work both before and after the concretisation of his theory of Spatialism. Notably, several of his iconic Attese works from the 1960s will be exhibited alongside key examples from the Gessi (1954—58) and Inchiostri (1956—59) series, as well as a remarkable Fine di Dio (End of God) from 1963—64. Its ovular form represents both origin and absolute; as Fontana put it, 'infinity, the inconceivable, the end of figuration, the beginning of nothingness'. In the tagli and the organic shapes found in his works from the 1950s, too, a suggestion of form and matter, bearing both their philosophical and physical meanings, emerges when confronted with the disarming corporeal intimacy of Baselitz's bodies laid bare. Brought together in the exhibition, they enter into a dialogue that activates the latent sense of the union of cosmic and bodily that lies just under the surface in both artists' works, centred around the infinite dark matter they both explore: as Baselitz states, 'just like in Courbet's L'Origine du monde [...] like a view of the sky, of eternity.' 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Flavia Frigeri, Curatorial and Collections Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Luca Massimo Barbero, Member of the Artistic Committee of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and leading Fontana scholar.

The second exhibition of Thaddaeus Ropac Milan's inaugural programme will be a landmark pairing of two major female artists, opening in November 2025.