L12022

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Lot 6
  • 6

Piero Manzoni

Estimate
2,000,000 - 3,000,000 GBP
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Description

  • Piero Manzoni
  • Achrome
  • kaolin on canvas
  • 70.5 by 100cm.; 27¾ by 39⅜in.
  • Executed in 1959-60.

Provenance

Studio Mirabello, Milan
Private Collection, Milan
Thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited

Bologna, Galleria de Foscherari, Piero Manzoni, 1974

Literature

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Milan 1975, p. 156, no. 130 cg, illustrated
Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 1991, p. 278, no. 365, illustrated
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan 2004, p. 426, no. 212, illustrated

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original, and the illustration fails to convey the painting's greatly pleated surface. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a 1cm stable hairline crack to the fold towards the bottom right corner, and another towards the top centre of the left edge with a very small associated paint loss. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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Catalogue Note

"The artist has achieved integral freedom; pure material becomes pure energy; all problems of artistic criticism are surmounted; everything is permitted." (Piero Manzoni, 'Free Dimension', Azimuth, no. 2, Milan 1960)

Executed between 1959 and 1960, Achrome is one of the most monumental and stunning works from Piero Manzoni's groundbreaking series. Representing the very ultimate expression of Manzoni's central philosophy, the present work stunningly epitomizes the artist's theoretical and technical quest to liberate painting from the constraints of representation and contrived gesture. Championed by the influential critic Germano Celant, "Manzoni's Achrome aspired to cut the umbilical cord between artefact and artificier; it aimed at reducing art's dependency on the artist... the Achrome represent no hue, no chromatic memory at all. Nothing that might recall nature of the artist's own passion" (Germano Celant in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 22). Today the Achrome inhabit a position of unassailable significance: the unalloyed primacy of material form crystallised as pure signifier posit one of the most radical conceptual gestures across the history of Twentieth Century art. Here, radiating incandescent energy via the tightly striated organic folds of solid kaolin, the revolutionary Achrome from 1959-60 stands among the most resplendent from this iconic corpus ever to appear for public sale.

Manzoni first initiated the Achrome in 1956 and in doing so rejected the existential and empirical questions with which his contemporaries were engaged. The Achrome was a blank slate, a mute surface and tabula rasa emancipated and emptied of narrative, expression, allegory and allusion; in the words of Celant, the Achrome embody "a maximum magnification of the visible, externalised with blinding whiteness, which undresses and depersonalises the painting, forcing it to live as if by its own light" (Germano Celant, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery, Piero Manzoni: A Retrospective, 2009, p. 31). Constituting an elementary sign, the Achrome does not signify or represent anything but its own existence; the individual character of the canvas achieves autonomous being in its own right. While machismo action of Abstract Expressionism was at the height of its powers in America and the European art scene was dominated by painterly gestures of Arte Informel, Manzoni disassociated the painted surface from the active participation of the artist. As explained by the artist, "abstractions and references must be totally avoided. In our freedom of invention we must succeed in constructing a world that can be measured only in its own terms" (Piero Manzoni, 'For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', c.1957, in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Piero Manzoni: Paintings, Reliefs and Objects, 1974, p. 17).

The quest for 'freedom' from narrative content was an agenda shared by a number of Manzoni's contemporaries. Indeed, the Achromes were almost certainly stimulated by the foundational dual-inquiries of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, while the IKB Monochromes executed by his contemporary and friend Yves Klein reflected the artistic impetus beset by Manzoni's milieu. Nonetheless, Manzoni's monochrome strategy was utterly singular and distinctively groundbreaking; rather than apply paint to the canvas' surface, the artist focused on the material of the painterly ground itself. By dislocating artistic agency and gesture from the canvas' surface, Manzoni aimed to strip away representation to obtain an entirely self-generated metaphysical image of absolute radical purity. Through the Achrome Manzoni endeavoured to freeze painting and suspend the composing elements rather than consume or transform them. Structured as a 'non-picture', the Achrome was composed via the exposure and drying process of the untouched 'virgin' canvas. As gloriously articulated in the present work, finely striated pleats horizontally stretched in sensuous folds across the imposing canvas are the exquisite result of the spontaneous action of the kaolin. This material, a soft china clay employed in making porcelain and first used by Manzoni in 1958, is not an impasto; it does not require brushing, pouring or physical manipulation as with the 'action' painters of Abstract Expressionism. Rather, Manzoni would first glue the canvas into a seemingly organic arrangement of self-proliferating folds and creases, before the chalky colourless kaolin solution was applied over the top. Even whiter and purer than the canvas ground beneath, the kaolin not only removed the trace of his hand but enhanced the depth and plasticity of the surface undulations. The resultant enigmatic work, with its torrent of tightly wrought folds, seems to harbour a dynamic energy within the gathers of the canvas, suggestive of a living, vibrant entity. Ultimately it is through the self-defining drying process, without the artist's intervention, that the work achieves its final form.

Throughout the series of Achromes, Manzoni took a detached empirical stance, executing trials into how different materials could transform our understanding of painting and challenge the physical constraints of colour, canvas, and horizontal/vertical surface. In an era dominated by Abstract Expressionism and Informel, Manzoni disassociated the painted surface from the active participation of the artist. As Manzoni propounded in 1960: "I am quite unable to understand those painters who, whilst declaring an active interest in modern problems, still continue even today to confront a painting as if it was a surface to be filled with colour and forms...Why shouldn't this surface be freed. Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute light" (the artist in: 'Free Dimension' in Azimuth no. 2, Milan, 1960). Though Manzoni experimented with different materials throughout the early 1960s, including substances as disparate as bread rolls, rabbit fur, gravel and wool, it is the iconic kaolin works that most effectively express his aim to eradicate any sense of personality or gesture.

The magnificently rich and chromatically homogenous surface evokes the powdery fragility of plaster as well as the cold solidity of marble. The absorption and reflection of natural light by the kaolin folds, accentuated by their angular striated ridges, evoke the tactile creases of sculpted Renaissance drapery, while the intricate surface complexity creates dramatic chiaroscuro to seduce our eye, as dark and light are strikingly juxtaposed. Seemingly white, the kaolin functions in removing colour whilst adding weight, imbuing these works with a certain sense of monumentality abstractly evocative of classical marble statuary. Nonetheless if this work evokes the monumental art of the past, it is testament only to the insularity of art itself, a purely visual language of resplendent luminous materiality.

During a tragically brief life cut short at the age of only thirty, Manzoni adopted a revolutionary conceptual approach to making and viewing art, emphasising the surface and materials as the true subject of the work. In the creation of the Achromes, Manzoni awakened an area of creativity in which the painting's subject was its own self-generating form; in 1960 he wrote: "The artist has achieved integral freedom; pure material becomes pure energy; all problems of artistic criticism are surmounted; everything is permitted" (Piero Manzoni, 'Free Dimension', Azimuth, no. 2, Milan 1960). Manzoni's prescient innovations anticipated both Conceptualism and Arte Povera, while his artistic legacy, enshrined by iconic works such as the present Achrome, enduringly persists as a revolutionary and insurmountable presence within contemporary art today.