Franco Fontana: A Life in Color: Online Retrospective
"SOMETIMES I FIND A LANDSCAPE SO IRRESISTIBLE THAT I FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE ... I BECOME THE LANDSCAPE AND THE LANDSCAPE BECOMES ME. I LIVE IT. I ALLOW THE LANDSCAPE TO FILL MY VOID, TO FILL ME WITH HAPPINESS AND JUST THEN I SHOOT."
The 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 the great 20th century color photographers as he celebrates his 90th birthday.
Franco Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colors. His early innovations in color photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition." Fontana uses 35mm cameras and deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon observed:
Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude.
