Ugo Mulas began his professional career as a photographer at the 1954 Venice Biennale and went on to photograph every Biennale until 1972. In the process, he befriended many of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, including Argentine-Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana. Beginning in 1965, Mulas documented Fontana’s creative process in a series of photos showing the artist in his studio making his famous Tagli (Cuts), monochrome canvases precisely slashed with sharp blades and sometimes lined with black gauze to give them added depth.

While Fontana disliked the intimacy of being photographed at work, even by a friend, he is perfectly at ease in this seemingly spontaneous portrait taken at the Biennale. Fontana’s own association with the Biennale went back to 1930, and his comfortable familiarity is evident here. In his double-breasted, pinstriped suit and repp tie, he could pass for a well-heeled collector or art dealer, seemingly enthroned in an antique armchair. He wears the square-toed shoes that ‘complement perfectly the tapered lines of today’s trousers’, as Esquire magazine observed in April 1962. The confident, casually regal image proved to be prophetic: in 1966, Fontana would be awarded the prestigious exhibition’s Grand Prize for painting.