Piero Manzoni elevated the body to art, filled his faeces into cans, turned his breath into an object, and thus became a pioneer of a contemporary understanding of art that has lost none of its power long after his premature death and still influences numerous young artists today.
(...) Continue readingPiero Manzoni – From traditional roots to avantgarde
Piero Manzoni was born Conte Meroni Manzoni di Chiosa e Poggiolo in Soncino, Cremona on 13 July 1933. Although his name in itself was a work of art, the young Count Meroni Manzoni of Chioca and Poggiolo initially chose sober law studies in Milan at the Accademia di Brera. Having made his first painting attempts at the age of 17, Manzoni soon realised that his profession lay somewhere else, and he broke of his studies and took up philosophy and art in Rome in 1954. In these early years of Piero Manzoni’s short career, he still produced mainly traditional portraits and landscape, but it was above all the influence of Informel artists such as Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri that pointed him in a new direction. The young man quickly recognised that the traditional language of art was not enough for him: he felt urged to set out, strive to cross border and reach new shores. In the search for like-minded people, in 1956 and 1957 signed the manifestos ‘Zur Entdeckung der Bildzone’, (On the Discovery of the Pictorial Zone), ‘Gegen den Stil’ (Against Style), and ‘Zur einer organischen Malerei’ (Towards an Organic Painting), and was also temporarily part of the ‘Gruppo Nucleare’.
First solo exhibitions; idiosyncratic art actions
Piero Manzoni experimented in many directions; after attending an Yves Klein exhibition, he created Anachrome in 1957, an unpainted canvas which the artist applied with structure through the application of plaster. That same year, Manzoni also had his first solo exhibitions in Como and Milan, and two years later, he opened the joint gallery ‘Azimuth’. Under the same name, the two conceptual artists published a magazine with which they sought to combine art and poetry, and this new development led to a renunciation of the ‘Gruppo Nucleare’. In the early 1960s, Manzoni travelled to Belgium, Germany, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands, and in Denmark the artist created a 7200-meter-long line which he packaged after its completion and removed from any further access. For the action ‘Consumazione dell’arte’, Piero Manzoni signed 150 boiled chicken eggs with his thumbprint and offered them to his audience for consumption.
Art as provocation: 90 boxes with a unique filling
Piero Manzoni’s most spectacular and controversial project was Merda d’artista, literally translated as ‘artist’s shit’. For this art action, he filled 90 cans with 30 grammes each of his own excrement, “naturally preserved”, and sold it at the then gold price of around $37 US dollars. The work divided critics and caused a huge stir; one single can was sold at auction for over 100,000 euros in 2008. The trigger for this idiosyncratic art action was said to have been the artist’s father, a down-to-earth manufacturer, who once harshly described his son’s work as “shit”.
Piero Manzoni died of a heart attack on 6 February 1963 in his Milan studio. He was only 30 years old. His work was presented posthumously at documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968 and at the Venice Biennale in 1972.
Piero Manzoni - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
