Inverno (Winter) was made in 1948, at a pivotal moment in Lucio Fontana’s career. The year before, he had returned to Italy after spending the war years in Argentina (1940–47), where he had reopened his practice with renewed urgency and, in 1946, published the Manifesto Blanco. That text called for an art attuned to a new conception of space, time and energy. In works such as this, the implications of that manifesto begin to take material form.

Although catalogued among the Figurativi Soggetti Vari (1936/37–1955), Inverno resists straightforward description. A female figure, theatrical in bearing and dress, seems to gather into herself both weight and movement. The body is not calmly modelled but pushed and pulled, its surfaces animated by the artist’s touch. Drapery becomes an extension of gesture. Form swells, twists and rises, as though continuing beyond its own contours.

Fontana had long worked in clay, including during his years in Argentina where he found expressive freedom in the medium and exploited the deep red local clay. On his return to Albisola in Liguria, he reconnected with the graphic vitality of his work from the 1930s: cursive, spatial signs and sweeping rhythms. In these ceramics he sought, in his own words and as later noted by scholars, to free material from residual descriptiveness and turn it into a “plastic event” that would go beyond subject matter.

The figure in Inverno is therefore less an illustration of winter than a catalyst for sculptural action. Rather than adopting the iconography of the machine favoured by the Futurists, Fontana worked within the enduring cultural trope of the female figure, infusing it with abstract energy. The result is not decorative narrative but expressive corporeality.

The theatrical character of the work also reflects a wider post-war revival of interest in commedia dell’arte and the tradition of the maschera. Between 1947 and 1953 Fontana produced Arlecchini, ballerini and other imaginary figures in costume, drawing on the legacy of eighteenth-century theatre. In Inverno, costume and body merge into a single dynamic structure. The clothing does not simply cover the form; it intensifies its movement.

Fontana himself wrote in 1951 that a new art was required, one in which “the plastic form is inseparable from the notion of time”, and in which images appear to leave the plane and continue their movement into space. That ambition is already evident here. The glazed and painted terracotta does not settle into a closed silhouette. It projects outward, activating the space around it. Colour and glaze catch the light, adding further vibration to the surface.

The work may recall the exuberance often labelled “baroque” in Fontana’s ceramics, yet this is not a revivalist gesture. As Lisa Ponti observed, to describe these works simply as baroque risks missing their intent. Fontana’s dynamism serves a Spatialist aim: to activate the total field of sculpture, uniting material, colour, light and surrounding space.

Seen in this light, Inverno also stands in pointed contrast to the tradition of Italian maiolica. Where fifteenth-century tin-glazed pottery presented carefully demarcated figurative scenes against white grounds, Fontana overturns that heritage. Rough modelling replaces refined contour; colour shifts and pools; abstraction and figuration fuse. The ceramic object no longer functions as decorative or utilitarian ware. It becomes autonomous and charged, defined by gesture and spatial force.

Inverno gathers matter, movement and light into a single, restless presence, anticipating the more radical spatial explorations that would soon define Fontana’s practice.