Piero Manzoni

Achrome

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni was born on 13 July 1933 in Soncino, in the province of Cremona. After high school, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, which he abandoned in favour of a degree course in philosophy. These were the years in which he began to frequent the artistic environment in Milan, where the figure of Lucio Fontana emerged, with whom Manzoni established a direct relationship. Similar in both artists was the desire to go beyond the restricted space of the picture surface. However, while for Fontana the solution was to go beyond it to analyse the mysterious spatial possibilities, for Manzoni this desire translated into an exploration of the material itself.

Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni was born on 13 July 1933 in Soncino, in the province of Cremona. After high school, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, which he abandoned in favour of a degree course in philosophy. These were the years in which he began to frequent the artistic environment in Milan, where the figure of Lucio Fontana emerged, with whom Manzoni established a direct relationship. Similar in both artists was the desire to go beyond the restricted space of the picture surface. However, while for Fontana the solution was to go beyond it to analyse the mysterious spatial possibilities, for Manzoni this desire translated into an exploration of the material itself.

In the autumn of 1957, Manzoni began his experiments with the series of paintings he would call Achrome. Unfortunately, his intense activity was interrupted by the artist's sudden death at the age of 29 on 6 February 1963. In just seven years, Piero Manzoni had managed to upset the rules and ridicule the art world with his provocations.

70 x 100 cm

Date: 1958
Medium: kaolin and wrinkled canvas

Intro

The Achromes are white, not painted but made by dipping the canvases: in the early works in plaster and then later in kaolin (the white earth used to make porcelain) and glue. The works appear curled in the middle, or divided into square or rectangular sections, and then left to dry. Since 1960, Manzoni had been making the Achromes from a wide variety of colourless materials including cotton wool, cloth, felt, glass wool, sandwiches, stones, polystyrene and even cobalt chloride, rabbit skin, straw and paper.

The work is located at Gallerie d'Italia - Napoli.

The Achromes are white, not painted but made by dipping the canvases: in the early works in plaster and then later in kaolin (the white earth used to make porcelain) and glue. The works appear curled in the middle, or divided into square or rectangular sections, and then left to dry. Since 1960, Manzoni had been making the Achromes from a wide variety of colourless materials including cotton wool, cloth, felt, glass wool, sandwiches, stones, polystyrene and even cobalt chloride, rabbit skin, straw and paper.

The work is located at Gallerie d'Italia - Napoli.

The work in question is a monochrome white surface made by dipping ordinary canvas in kaolin. Through this process, the rough surface reveals the folds formed by the canvas, which has sagged under the weight of the wet, hardened clay into stiff, irregular curls.

Through his somewhat extreme productions, Manzoni wanted to rid the artwork of any narrative and emotional content.

The absence of colour and representation, together with the specific working techniques used to manipulate the materials, eliminate the need for any expressive gesture or action on the part of the artist. Manzoni thus created a work whose only content is the material itself.