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Fontana, Franco

Italian, b. 1933 Modena

BiographyIn vividly colored photographs, Franco Fontana flattens the natural landscape into a set of geometric shapes and chromatic bands. His approach involves a kind of formal reduction, transforming the tangible world into more basic graphic elements, without becoming altogether abstract. As Fontana stated in The Sunday Times (UK), "Extracting a few essential elements from the entirety that presents itself to the human eye is one of my inner requirements: to achieve a harmonic unity through the elimination of all disturbing natural elements. In this way a landscape is born which is made up by subtle relations of space, form, drawing and color.”

Born in Modena, Italy in 1933, Fontana began working as a photographer in 1961. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; National Gallery, Beijing; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Turin. Fontana has photographed for many publicity campaigns and international publications, including TIME-LIFE and Vogue. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the "150 Years of Photography" Award, Photographic Society of Japan (1990).