10.05.07 | 24.09.07

Senza titolo [Untitled] 1957 Frog pond 1957 untitled 1957 Achrome 1960 - 1961 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Merda d'artista [Artist's Shit] 1961 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1959 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1958 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1962 le cose 1956 Untitled 1956 Untitled 1956 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1957 - 1958 Achrome 1958 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1960 Achrome 1959 - 1960 Untitled 1957 8 tavole di accertamento 1958 - 1960 sculpure egg 1960 sculpture egg 1960 Linea 15,81 1959   Tavole d'accertamento Gorgonia 1961 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 - 1962 white rotor 1958 Corpo d’aria n.28 1959 - 1960 Fiato d'artista 1960 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 - 1962 magic base - living sculpture 1961 Uova scultura 1960 Achrome 1957 - 1958 Achrome 1961 Merda d’artista (n.63) 1961 Magisk Sokkel Nr. 2 1961 Achrome 1960 Achrome 1958 Achrome 1959 - 1960 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1958 Achrome 1958 - 1959 line mt 1140 1961 Linea di lunghezza infinita 1960 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1962 Linea m 7200 1960 Achome 1957 - 1958 Achrome 1957 - 1958 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1959 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1960 - 1961 Achrome 1959 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1962 Magisk Sockkel nr 2 (base magica) 1961 Placentarium (project) 1960 Achrome 1961 Achrome 1958 - 1959 Achrome 1961 - 1962 Achrome 1962 Achrome 1958 - 1959

Piero Manzoni

Achrome

1959 - 1960

Courtesy :

Manzoni’s Achromes (literally “colorless”) were conceived in the autumn of 1957 and they continued to be part and parcel of his development down to 1963. They first took the form of white surfaces soaked in kaolin (the fine white clay used in making china) or covered with raw plaster. The image was simply the form taken by the material as it set. The artist did not intervene directly to complete the work but allowed it to develop on its own, emerging directly from the material and the intrinsic vitality of its transformation. The immediate reference here was to the monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, capable, by their absoluteness, of a quest for something that lies outside mundane, everyday events, and of reaching the boundaries of the infinite, the intangible and the indefinable. As pure condensations of matter, however, the first Achromes exhibited in 1958 at the Galleria Pater in Milan reveal a debt to the tachiste work of Alberto Burri with his Sacchi and the Otages of Jean Fautrier, though without sharing their existential exaltation of color-material. Unlike them, the material of the Achromes lacks lacerations of the epidermis or stratifications subtending memories and it shuns allusions to social or personal dramas. All it evokes is its own obvious presence, as confirmed by the artist’s exclusion of gesture and action. Manzoni strips the painting of every external interference extraneous to the pictorial surface, which remains present, by contrast, in Fontana’s peremptory gesture, in the emotional exaltation of the informal and in the automatism of the atomic foreshadowings of nuclear art, in Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting, in Abstract Expressionism, both European and American, in which Conrad Marca-Relli progressively took his tachiste painting towards a new structuring of the image through the collage painting technique.

Achrome

1958

Achrome

1958 - 1959

Achrome

1959 - 1960

Achrome

1958 - 1959

Soncino (Bs) 1933 | Milano 1963
Manzoni was born in Soncino, in the province of Cremona, on July 13th 1933, of counts Meroni Manzoni di Chiosca and Poggiolo. He studied in Milan at the Leone XIII classical ...
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