Concetto Spaziale (1960) by Lucio Fontana has taken £1.6m ($2.5m) at Sotheby's 20th Century Italian Art auction in London.
The October 17 sale saw the work achieve an increase of 13% over its £1m-1.4m ($1.6m-2.2m) estimate.
The painting features thick yellow oil paint studded with slashes and stabs, and is a prime example of the work of the spacialist movement - which sought to transcend art by breaking through to the space beyond the canvas.
 Concetto Spaziale has been exhibited widely in Europe and the US |
Works by the groundbreaking Italian artist have achieved impressive figures in the past. Concetto Spaziale, Le Chiese de Vienna made $6.8m at Sotheby's earlier this year.
Marino Marini's L'Idea De Cavalier (1955) was another high performing lot, hammering for £962,500 ($1.5m) - in the middle of its £800,000-1.2m ($1.2m-1.9m) estimate.
 Marini's L'Idea De Cavalier is one of an edition of nine |
Ancient statues of horses and riders were the inspiration for the work. Marini was obsessed with making the subject matter applicable to the 20th century - leading him to create a series of highly abstract figures frozen in fear, seemingly about to be thrown from their mounts, that mirror the tension of the cold war.
Alberto Burri's Bianco-Rosso (T T X) (1954) made a 42% increase on its £400,000-600,000 ($639,680-959,520) estimate, achieving a figure of £854,500 ($1.3m).
Burri was an artist who incorporated industrial materials like plastic, wood and concrete into his paintings.
Along with Fontana he is commonly associated with the arte informale movement, a variant of abstraction that pushed the limits of painting and sculpture beyond traditional boundaries by placing an emphasis on method and material over the creation of rational forms.
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