- Author Antoon Melissen
- Date February 2026
It is an object that reveals unexpected secrets, the edition co-conceived by Lucio Fontana and photographer Lothar Wolleh (Berlin, 1930–London, 1979) in 1966–1967. What at first sight appears to be a single work, a multicoloured so-called Teatrino by Fontana, on closer inspection turns out to be ‘a collaboration in unison’.
In a black-lacquered casing, and in an edition of fifteen copies, works of the two artists have been brought together: the Teatrino, photographs by Lothar Wolleh and, out of immediate sight, a Concetto spaziale in metal, also by Fontana. With the casing, the artists expanded traditional assumptions about painting, sculpture and portrait photography. The edition testifies above all, however, to what the artists have in common: a large dose of bravado and the joy of creative cross-fertilization.
Sensitized by ZERO
In 1962, even before completing his studies at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung (Folkwang School of Design) in Essen, Lothar Wolleh opened a photo studio in Düsseldorf. Although Wolleh worked as a photographer for leading advertising agencies from the early 1960s, it was his artists’ portraits that established his reputation. In barely twenty years, he portrayed 160 artists, including a large number of those associated with ZERO, the international art movement that took root around the artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in Düsseldorf in the late 1950s.1 The dynamic cultural climate of the city made a deep impression on the young Lothar Wolleh, fresh from the academy.
Wolleh and Lucio Fontana came into contact in 1963 through their artist-friend Günther Uecker and the American artist-curator Willoughby Sharp. Three years earlier, Fontana had made his tempestuous entry into the German art scene with an exhibition at the Galerie Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf.2 It was, however, the exhibition Lucio Fontana – Werke aus 3 Jahrzehnten in Leverkusen in 1962, the most comprehensive exhibition of his work to date, that established his status as the uncontested paterfamilias of the ZERO movement.3 The exhibition showed, according to Otto Piene, “people and ‘painting’, that they do not have to be what they are expected to be.”4 It is hardly surprising, in this respect, that Fontana was on Wolleh’s radar early on. “Lothar Wolleh was sensitized by ZERO”, so agreed Heinz Mack: “He was a man who responded almost seismically to affairs (…) So he sought out and found opportunities for adventure with great dedication and gusto.”5
Forms of Artistic Collaboration
After viewing the exhibition in Leverkusen, Wolleh soon decided to pay Fontana a visit. Between 1963 and 1967, he visited the studio on the Corso Montforte in Milan at least thirteen times. Contact between the artists quickly intensified. Following in Fontana’s footsteps, Wolleh also attended the finissage of the ambitious ZERO exhibition Nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig (Nul nineteen hundred sixty-five) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Fontana is the focus of Wolleh’s photographic account of the festive reception.6 Plans for a collaborative edition may well have emerged in the aftermath of these encounters.
‘Artistic collaborations’ of this kind were not new to Fontana. In 1963, his friendship with Jef Verheyen and Hermann Goepfert, also artists in the context of ZERO, had resulted in a collaborative work in which the separate contributions functioned in a symbiosis. Fontana provided a monochrome canvas by Verheyen with perforations, the so-called buchi, and Goepfert added a three-dimensional metal object hanging in front of the canvas. A year later, Fontana, working with Nanda Vigo, conceived an environment, Ambiente spaziale: Utopias (1964), for the Milan Triennial. In these years, Wolleh, too, was in contact with Nanda Vigo, which resulted in a number of portraits and her designs for an (unrealized) Ambiente, a spatial installation for Wolleh’s Düsseldorf penthouse.
With respect to collaboration with Wolleh, his ‘other life’ as an advertising photographer also had a strong appeal. ZERO artists were media-sensitive to the core. Radio, television, film and photography were put to use to promote a new artistic identity, and connections with photographers and film-makers like Reiner Ruthenbeck, Manfred Tischer, Gerd Winkler and Lothar Wolleh were considered to be valuable supplements to their own art practices. As an initiator ánd a participating artist in collaborative projects, Wolleh occupied a unique place in this spectrum. The Fontana-Wolleh edition, Wolleh’s first project of its kind, turned out to be a blueprint for editions and artists’ books in subsequent years, in cooperation with, among others, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Graubner, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack, Blinky Palermo, Jan Schoonhoven, Günther Uecker and the Nouveaux Réalistes group.7
Between Consumer Aesthetics and Cosmos
Lothar Wolleh’s photographs of Fontana’s studio illustrate that the Teatrini, in particular, drew his attention; such a work is also the eye-catching part of the edition. Fontana willingly posed while cleaning a Teatrino at his studio, with a feather duster at the ready, and Wolleh also photographed sketches in pencil on wood for new works of this kind. These ‘little theatres’, most of them made in the years 1964 to 1966, are compositional objects, consisting of perforated, monochrome canvases beneath whimsically shaped frames of lacquered wood. The works occupy a special place within the oeuvre both formally and conceptually, even if we recognize Fontana’s preoccupation with spatiality and dimensionality in the layered construction with ‘coulisses’. Fontana based the framing shapes on natural elements, on trees and plants, and in a few Teatrini, the motifs of his spherical sculpture series Nature, the earliest of which were created in 1959, can also be recognized. In the work being discussed here, however, this ‘realistic’ component takes on an utterly new shape: for the capriciously frames, Fontana used the contours of his own profile, photographed by Wolleh, as the basis.
Fontana explores the figurative element of Wolleh’s contribution.
The wooden casing comprises four of Lothar Wolleh’s photographs, three portraits and a close-up of Fontana’s hands. The photographs and the Teatrino frames have been assembled, stacked in the box frame, with the portrait en profilas the first, visible motif. To this photograph, Fontana added a frame of three layers in the colours magenta, orange and black – exceptional, because the Teatrini usually consist of a single frame in front of a back plane. Did the artists consciously seek to divide their contributions democratically? After all, besides Wolleh’s four photographs, Fontana also contributed four ‘elements’, three Teatrino frames and a metal Concetto spaziale. In its composed, closed form – that is, with all the objects in the box frame beneath the enclosing cover – the imagery moves along the fault line between recognition and anticipation. Fontana plays out the figurative element of Wolleh’s contribution by partially covering the motif – and then accentuates it nevertheless with the fluid lines of his framework. In this field of tension between the abstract and the figurative, the artists achieve a harmony exceeding the strict individuality of their contributions.
Fontana’s visit to the Venice Biennale in 1964, the year of the earliest Teatrini, is significant here. At the Biennale, Europe encountered American Pop Art for the first time. Moreover, the winner of the Gran Premio in 1964, the American Robert Rauschenberg, exhibited his Combines in Venice, works aspiring to the ambiguity of neither canvas nor object; works in which Rauschenberg also integrated photographs from newspapers and magazines. With the striking colours of the Teatrino frames, the symbiosis with photography and an enclosing Plexiglas cover, the ‘Fontana-Wolleh box frame’ hints without a doubt at the consumer aesthetics of Pop Art. According to Enrico Crispolti, the Teatrini possess a certain “Post-Pop figurative quality”.8 Where, however, Pop Art ran up against the borders of the ‘earthly’, Fontana was looking for an intrinsic and spiritual – cosmic – depth. On the back of a Concetto spaziale from 1964, Fontana wrote “Che barba con il Pop Art” – “Bored with Pop Art”.9 The consumer society, mass media and popular culture inspired, without question. But what Fontana contributed were qualities anticipating suggestion and emotional participation – with a large dose of stardust in the mix, one might say, and a belief in eternity.
New Art for a New Age
In the final years of his life, Fontana increasingly left the execution of his works to third parties; this was true for his jewellery designs, and also for the Teatrini. In 1965, he was involved in a project of comparable conceptual intent. On the occasion of the ZERO exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam mentioned previously, curator and Nul-artist Henk Peeters proposed offering multiples as construction kits in the museum shop. Fontana, George Ricky and the Dutch Nul artist Armando had the museum make prototypes; in Fontana’s case, a signed and numbered metal sheet, which buyers could perforate according to an indicated pattern – a proper DIY Concetto spaziale, in other words.
The underlying concept is that art is multipliable
With respect to the replicability of art, Edition MAT (the abbreviation for Multiplication d’Art Transformable) by Daniel Spoerri and Karl Gerstner exerted a powerful influence on the projects discussed here. Between 1959 and 1965, three editions appeared, containing limited editions of works of art by a total of 35 artists. To Wolleh, who owned a work by Man Ray from this series, the idea of replicable, accessible works of art was very appealing. “It was exactly what we wanted”, Heinz Mack remembers: “Art not only belongs in a posh gallery, but should also be sold in a department store. And this basic idea, that art is replicable (...) and technically innovative, this was really new at the time. In his own way, Wolleh immediately was a part of this.”10
The willingness to collaborate and, as Henk Peeters put it, “to want to mean something to your friends”, made the ZERO movement fruitful ground for innovative projects.11 The Fontana-Wolleh edition expresses the optimism of the 1960s and the wish to be genuinely ‘of now’ – a leitmotif in the oeuvre of both artists. Truly new art, Fontana had already written in his ‘Manifiesto blanco’ of 1946, is “(…) an art, in which our idea of art cannot intervene”.12 A desire leading to forms of expression requiring new names – Spazialismo, Concetto Spaziale – and feeding on an indifference to traditional views on materiality, dimensionality and craftsmanship.13
Integrating various media, photography, a Teatrino and a metal Concetto spaziale in a single casing, will have appealed powerfully to the imagination of the artists, especially due to the indeterminate status of the object. The object is neither painting nor sculpture, neither installation nor wall piece, neither assemblage nor artists’ book. And it is precisely this ambiguity, this sought-after ambivalence, that allows the contributions of both artists to stand in their own right.
1 The artists’ magazine Zero, published independently by Mack and Piene from 1958, played a key role in this. Zero appeared in April 1958, October 1958 and July 1961. Concerning the magazine, see: Dirk Pörschmann and Mattijs Visser (eds.), 4 3 2 1 ZERO, Düsseldorf 2012.
2 Lucio Fontana, Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf, opening 29 January 1960.
3 Lucio Fontana – Werke aus 3 Jahrzehnten, Museum Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen, 12 January–15 February 1962.
4 Otto Piene, in: Lucio Fontana, exhib. cat. (Leverkusen: Museum Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen), no pag.
5 Heinz Mack in conversation with the author, 6 November 2019.
6 Nul negentienhonderd vijf en zestig, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 15 April–7 June 1965.
7 See: Antoon Melissen (ed.), Joseph Beuys and Lothar Wolleh. The Unterwasserbuch Project (Berlin 2021), and: Antoon Melissen (ed.) Lothar Wolleh sees Jan Schoonhoven (Zwolle 2023). Parts of these publications are reprints of the artists’ books of 1971.
8 Enrico Crispolti, “On the Creative Adventure of Lucio Fontana”, in: Enrico Crispolti (ed.), Fontana, Milan 1999, p. 40.
9 Cited in: Paolo Campiglio, “I Only Believe in Art”, in: Luca Massimo Barbero (ed.), Lucio Fontana. Venice/New York, exhib. cat. (Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection), p. 218.
10 Heinz Mack in conversation with the author, 6 November 2019. Mack is referring to the edition Art Scene Düsseldorf. Eine Dokumentation von Lothar Wolleh (Düsseldorf: artist’s publication), 1972. Box frame with portrait photographs (by Wolleh) and multiples and graphics by Joseph Beuys, Karl Gerstner, Gerhard Graubner, Erwin Heerich, Konrad Klapheck, Ferdinand Kriwet, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack and Blinky Palermo.
11 Henk Peeters in conversation with the author, 6 July 2011.
12 Lucio Fontana, ‘Manifiesto blanco’, 1946, in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Malden 2004, p. 652.
13 See also: Antoon Melissen, “Transforming Reality. Azimut/h: Between Radical Abstraction and the Poetics of the Object”, in: Luca Massimo Barbero (ed.), Azimut/h. Continuity and Newness, exhib. cat. (Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2014), p. 147–149.
The article by Antoon Melissen is taken from:
“Lucio Fontana. Erwartung”
Ed. Roland Mönig. Catalogue, Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal 2024. 21.5 × 32 cm, 160 pp., pp. 125–134.
Translation to English by Lothar Wolleh Estate.