Lucio Fontana is an Italian-Argentinian artist known as the founder of Spatialism, an artistic movement concerned with the spatial qualities of sculpture and painting, with the aim of breaking with the two-dimensionality of the traditional pictorial plane. He is best known for his monochrome canvases known as Concetto Spaziale, which he lacerates or perforates, leaving gaping marks and holes that give them an almost violent energy. In his White Manifesto (1946), the artist presented ideas for creating a new medium that blended architecture, painting and sculpture. Fontana influenced the next generation of artists, who began to use installations more aggressively to address the dynamics of space in galleries and in Land Art. Born on 19 February 1899 in Rosario de Santa Fé in Argentina, the painter and sculptor spent his career travelling between Argentina and Italy. Fontana died on 7 September 1968 in Varese, Italy, at the age of 69, just two years after winning the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.