Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), the artist recognized for taking abstract painting into the third dimen sion by slashing his canvases, unsurprisingly star ted his career as a sculptor. Lesser known is his work as a ceramicist, which began in the mid-1930s and awakened an exploration of materiality, which profoundly informed his practice as an artist. This interest was developed parallel to his painting and was, in many ways, indistinguishable from his work as a sculptor. As Fontana continued to create ceramics, he became increasingly obsessed with the concept of matter as it related to the mass and volume of the sculpted object. His exploration of the physicality and weight of a work of art prefigured his later desire and success diminishing the materiality of his art. He sought to discover a form that could exceed its own materiality. He sought to test the possibilities of space. He sought to create an object with absolute plasticity. And he sought to discover an ideal abstract form, opposed to the accepted, geometrical forms.