Italian artist whose questioning of convention was an important source for *Arte Povera and *Conceptual art. He was born into an aristocratic family at Soncino and studied briefly at the Brera Academy in nearby Milan, the city in which he spent most of his short career. Until 1956 he painted in a traditional style (mainly landscapes), but he then turned to avant-garde work, making pictures featuring impressions left by objects such as keys and scissors that had been dipped in paint or tar. In 1957 he began to produce Achromes, textured white paintings influenced by *Burri and by *Klein (whom he met at an exhibition of the Frenchman's work in Milan in 1957). Manzoni's first one-man exhibition was held in the foyer of the Teatro delle Maschere, Milan, in the same year.
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The most important characteristic of the achromes was that their form was a product of their material existence. For instance the canvases were sometimes creased and stiffened by soaking in kaolin or made up of patches sewn together. White no longer had the connotations of purity and cleanliness associated with the tradition of idealist geometric modernism, the stuccoed walls of International Style architecture or the pure white of a Ben *Nicholson relief. White was also the colour of bird excrement. From 1959 Manzoni devised a series of provocative works and gestures. Art could be the product of the artist's body, as in his cans of ‘artist's shit’ in limited editions or his balloons filled with the artist's breath. Rumours abound about the actual filling of the ‘shit cans’, which have been said to contain plaster or pineapple chunks. Tate's example is cautiously catalogued as ‘unknown contents’. Manzoni's wealthy father had a meat canning factory and had described his son's work as ‘shit’. The balloons have long since deflated and survive as mementoes. One has been photographed kept by a collector under a bell jar to preserve the last precious molecules of the breath. Hand-drawn lines of precise length were placed in sealed capsules mocking abstraction's quest for the infinite and spiritual. The bodies of naked women were signed by the artist and he gave (a special privilege accorded to Marcel *Broodthaers and a few others) or sold certificates declaring individuals as works of art. Sometimes there would be conditions applied. One subject was a work of art only when he slept. Manzoni's early death was caused by cirrhosis. Further Reading G. Celant, Piero Manzoni (1998) J. Miller, ‘Excremental Value’, Tate Etc. (summer 2007)
Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)
