Franco Fontana, Italian Vintage Dye Transfer Photograph Franco Fontana Color Varsavia Photo, 1977

Franco Fontana (Italian, born 1933)
Title: Varsavia, (Warsaw, Poland streetscape with buildings)
1977
Medium: dye-transfer
Dimensions: Frame 28.5 x 20.5. Sight 20 x 13.
Provenance: Monique Goldstrom Gallery

Franco Fontana (Italian, 1933) is an Italian photographer. He is best known for his Minimalist abstract colour landscapes. He was influenced by Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism.
Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Modena. He started taking photographs in the 1950s when he was working as a decorator in a furniture showroom. In 1961 he joined a local amateur club in Modena. The experience would be a turning point in his career, and Fontana went on to have his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Società Fotografica Subalpina, Turin and at the Galleria della Sala di Cultura in Modena in 1968. Since then he has participated in more than 400 group and solo exhibitions including the exhibit Lines, Spheres and Glyphs at Robert Klein Gallery with works by photographers: Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli, Ernst Haas, Gyorgy Kepes and Aaron Siskind. Franco Fontana is considered one of the most relevant photographers of our time, In 1963 he exhibited his work at the Biennale of Color in Vienna, and in 1968 he held his first solo exhibition in Modena. Fontana often pares landscapes down to their essential elements, producing flat, geometric compositions reminiscent of the color field abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, by underexposing his transparencies. Contrasting blue skies with green or yellow grass and the rigid lines of buildings with the softness of puffy clouds, he makes color and texture his primary subjects. He has also shot in Polaroid film. His art has been acquired by some of the most important museums worldwide, including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, MoMA in New York, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Norman, Oklahoma, National Gallery in Beijing, Australian National Gallery in Melbourne, University of Texas in Austin, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris. Fontana has photographed for advertising campaigns for brands such as Fiat, Volkswagen, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, Snam, Sony, Volvo, Versace, Canon, Kodak, Robe di Kappa, Swissair, and has been a magazine photographer for publications including Time, Life, Vogue (USA and France), Venerdì di Repubblica, Panorama, and with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The New York Times.
Fontana’s first book, Skyline, was published in 1978 in France by Contrejour and in Italy by Punto e Virgola with a text by Helmut Gernsheim. Fontana is the art director of the Toscana Foto Festival.
He has received numerous awards, such as the 1989 Tokyo Photographer Society of Japan – The 150 Years of Photography – Photographer Award.
Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colours. His early innovations in colour 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 as noted by Iwan Zahar, deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. This is an effect that Franco Lefèvre has described as ‘dialectical landscapism’. Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi (‘Synthesis’) at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon has observed; “His bold geometric compositions are characterised by shimmering colours, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language, By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative colour photography for then multicolour was not in fashion in art photography., The way Fontana shoots, dematerializes the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing”.
Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude. He was included in the exhibition of the Helmut Newton Collection along with Brassaï, Diane Arbus, Franco Fontana, Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn, June Newton, Just Loomis, Man Ray, Mark Arbeit
Peter Beard, Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe. Fontana’s photographs have also been used as album cover art for records produced by the ECM Records jazz label.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
George Eastman Museum, (Kodak) Rochester, New York
The Israel Museum. Jerusalem
Kemper Art Museum[
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Rose Art Museum
Princeton University Art Museum
National Museum, Beijing, China
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Latina
Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, MoMA
Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany
National Gallery, Beijing
The Australian National Gallery, Melbourne
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Museo de Arte de São Paolo, Sao Paolo Brazil
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