Lucio Fontana's Rare White 'La fine di Dio' Heads to Sotheby's New York

A rare white version of Lucio Fontana's 'Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio' (1963) will be auctioned at Sotheby's New York on November 15, 2023, with an estimate of $18-22 million. The work, one of only five white examples from the series of 38 monumental paintings created between 1963 and 1964, has not been seen publicly in over a decade. It will be previewed at Sotheby's Milan (October 5-6) at Palazzo Serbelloni, then in Paris (October 14-19) before the New York sale. This marks the return of a white 'La fine di Dio' to the market since 2004; a white version last sold in 2018 (a different color variant achieved over $21 million at Christie's London). Of the five white works, two are in museum collections (Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), and two are in private European collections. The series holds Fontana's top five auction prices, including a yellow 1964 version that set a record at $29.2 million at Christie's in 2015. Claudia Dwek, Sotheby's Chairman of Contemporary Art Europe, called the painting a masterpiece of Fontana's most celebrated series, while Kelsey Leonard, Sotheby's Head of Contemporary Evening Auction New York, emphasized the work's radical challenge to traditional boundaries between painting, sculpture, and space. Fontana considered white the purest, most immediate color for this cycle, embodying 'pure simplicity, pure philosophy, spatial philosophy, cosmic philosophy'.