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Franco Fontana: A Life in Color
Online Retrospective March 15 - April 30, 2024The Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present the Online Retrospective 'Franco Fontana: A Life in Color.' Looking back at more than 60 years of photography, we honor one of...Read more -
Polaroid Dreams (1984-1996)
Online Artsy Exhibition July 20 - August 28, 2022CLICK HERE FOR PRICING AND AVAILABILITYRead more -
Franco Fontana: True Color
@ Robert Klein Gallery (38 Newbury Street) June 29 - August 16, 2019For over fifty years Fontana has created formalistic photographs that utilize a keen sense of color and compositional balance. While he has tackled numerous subjects during his extensive career, he...Read more
“The invisible is our foundation. Think of a tree: it lives with the help of its roots, which you cannot see. That is the kind of invisible reality that I want to capture and to remove everything that is unnecessary.”
Franco Fontana is best known for his abstract color landscapes, which pare down Earth’s many elements to just green and yellow grass, blue sky, green trees and white clouds. He is considered the inventor of the photographic concept of line. Writes Giuliana Scimé in the 1982 volume of Contemporary Photographers:
“The old debate between those who argue for a pure photography and those who support freedom in the employment of the medium—that argument is settled, paradoxically, in Fontana’s work: it is a representation of the real with no technical elaboration or manipulation during the photo-chemical-mechanical process. There is just his capacity to see, to select, that enables him to extract certain elements from the immense panorama of the concrete world.”
“….what you see is colourful and has to be reinvented [by the photographer] because the colour itself must turn an object into a subject. If it remains merely an object, then I think the film, and not the photographer, is managing the colour.”
Born in 1933 in Modena, Italy, Franco Fontana started taking photographs in 1961. In 1968, Fontana had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena. He first exhibited work internationally in 1972 in Vienna, then traveled to the United States in 1979.
Fontana still lives and works in Modena, Italy.
Selected Collections:
International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany
Museum of Art, Norman, Oklahoma
National Gallery, Beijing
The Australian National Gallery, Melbourne
University of Texas, Austin
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Muséed'ArtModerne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Museo de Arte de São Paolo, Sao Paolo
Schweizerische Stiftung für die Fotografie, Winterthur
Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Victoria & Albert Museum, London