A true pioneer of colour photography, Franco Fontana was born in Modena in 1933, where he still lives and works today.

Renowned for his intense and abstracted ‘scapes’: landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes and bodyscapes. Fontana’s true subject is and how it can express something beyond visual reality, even when the literal subjects of the artist’s photographs are fields, buildings or city pavements. His images are flooded with a shimmering brilliance that shifts meaning to another register, at once abstract and poetic. Here are landscapes in sweeping curves or made up of stripes, as if passing at speed: Fontana’s eye is always travelling. When it does settle, both land- and cityscapes appear as composed from vivid building blocks whose colours collide and sizzle on the image surface.

Active since the late 50s, his aesthetic research has always been solely devoted to the world of colour, a true exception in a field dominated by a purist black and white aesthetic.

In his seven decades-long career Fontana has published hundreds books in seven languages and his work is held in collections including Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Metropolitan Museum, Tokyo; Museé d’Art Moderne, Paris; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Museo de Arte São Paolo, Brazil; FMAV, Modena; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.