Lucio Fontana was born in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina and raised in Milan, Italy. In his early twenties, Fontana worked as a sculptor in his father's studio in Argentina. In 1928 he returned to Milan to study at the Accademia di belle arti di Brera and had his first solo show in 1930 at Galleria Il Milione in Milan. Fontana's work is characterized by its gestural aesthetic and spatial awareness. In 1947 Fontana collaborated with a group of writers and philosophers, to create the First Manifesto of Spatialism, a movement to synthesize colour, sound, space, movement, and time. 

In the late 1940s, Fontana began puncturing the surface of his canvases, conflating the modes of two and three dimensionality and blurring the distinction between painting and sculpture. He deemed these works as explorations of spatial environments. The punctures, or 'Tagli' became a central feature of his work, and through the 1950s and 60s, Fontana made small, decisive incisions on both unprimed and monochrome-painted canvas backed with black gauze to evoke the notion of a void beyond the frame. They were at once representative of creation and destruction. In 1966 he presented his Tagli works at the Venice Biennale. On his later works, Fontana notes "art dies but is saved by the gesture." (Lucio Fontana 1899-1968: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1977, p.19)

In 1977 his first retrospective was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His work has since been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries internationally including the Art Informel in Italy; the Venice Biennale; the 1968 Documenta in West Germany; Musée national d'art moderne de la ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1987); Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1988); Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (1996); Museo National Cantro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1998); and Hayward Gallery, London (1999).