Piero Manzoni

Galleria Forma, Genova
Il Collezionista d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome
Collection Malabarba, Milan
Collection Claudia Gian Ferrari, Milan (acquired from the above circa 1980)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Venice, Sale Apollinee Teatro La Fenice Venezia, Mostra Opere Manzoni, June 1968
Rome, Studio d'Arte La Tartaruga, Rigore e Utopia a Milano. Scheggi Manzoni Fontana Castellani Bonalumi Alviana, December 1970, illustrated

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: Catalogo Generale, Milan, 1975, cat. no. 23, p. 130, illustrated
Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue Raisonné, Milan, 1991, cat. no. 408, fig. 408, p. 289, illustrated
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: Catalogo Generale, Tomo Secondo, Milan, 2004, cat. no. 436, p. 458, illustrated

This work is in very good condition. There is evidence of very minor stable craquelure where the folded canvas material meets the center of the left vertical edge, as is to be expected due to the nature of the work's construction. The kaolin application is typical of the artist with s few areas more thinly applied than others. There are scattered very minor liquid accretions – likely dating to the artist's studio – primarily in the lower half and visible under ultraviolet light examination. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a wood frame painted white with a 3 ¼ inch float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

By dislocating artistic agency and gesture from the surface of the canvas, Piero Manzoni aimed to eradicate representation and obtain a self-generated image of absolute purity. Herein, the series of Achrome constitute the physical expression of this metaphysical ambition. Comprising a serene monochrome expanse interrupted by a band of exquisite sculptural folds, the present work hails from 1958, the very first year of Manzoni’s era-defining achromatic enterprise.  Concurrent with the ZERO movement, Manzoni steered his career towards the forefront of a debate for the autonomy of art; alongside his contemporaries Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, Manzoni was part of a revolutionary artistic impetus to transcend the preconceived boundaries of painting on canvas, and supplant tangible and fixed appearances in art.

Where Fontana and Klein both experimented with and relied conceptually upon color in their art, Manzoni distinguished his own critical dialogue by utilizing only the porcelain white of kaolin clay to articulate an entirely new pictorial attitude. Where Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism pierced the canvas to reveal a cosmic dimension beyond and Yves Klein strove for a concept of color that promised access to a sublime state of meditative transcendence, Manzoni revolted against the implication that art lay ‘on’ or ‘through’ the canvas or within any given chromatic tone. His philosophy, advanced primarily in the Azimuth journal, established an entirely different approach to the two-dimensional work of art. Manzoni wrote: “I am unable to understand the painters that, whilst declaring themselves to be interested in modern problems, even today look on a painting as if it was a surface to be filled with color and forms… Why not liberate the surface? Why not attempt to discover the limitless significance of total space? Of pure and absolute light?” (Piero Manzoni, “Free Dimension”, Azimuth, No. 2, 1960, n.p)

Structured as a 'non-picture', the Achrome were composed via the drying process of kaolin. This material, a soft china clay employed in making porcelain and first employed by Manzoni in 1958, is not an impasto; it does not require brushing or any physical manipulation. Rather, Manzoni would first glue the canvas into a seemingly organic arrangement of self-proliferating folds and creases, before the chalky colorless kaolin solution was applied. The white kaolin not only removed the hand of the artist but also enhanced the sculptural depth and solidity of surface undulations. With its horizontal swathe of striated and sculptural folds interrupting an expanse of serenely flat monochrome, the present work bursts with a dynamic energy that is entirely its own. Ultimately it is through the self-defining drying process, without the artist's intervention, that the work achieves its final form. Seemingly white, the kaolin functions in removing color whilst adding weight, a process that imbues the Achrome with sculptural monumentality. Nonetheless if this work evokes the canonical art of the past – namely the ripples and folds familiar to ancient and Renaissance marble statuary – it is testament only to the insularity of art itself and its possession of an innate language of luminous materiality.

As the curator Jon Thompson has elucidated, the Achrome are material tautologies; they refer only to themselves as reiterations of their own composition. (Jon Thompson, “Piero Manzoni: Out of Time and Place” in Exh. Cat., London, Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 43) Canvas laid upon canvas, folding in on itself in self-generating monochrome pleats, the Achrome constitutes a metaphysical blank, a distillation of the picture plane to pure material characteristics. With a title that etymologically means ‘without color’ these works are unrelated to any pictorial phenomenon extraneous to its surface. In the words of the artist: “It is a white that is not a polar landscape, or a beautiful or evocative material, or a sensation, or a symbol, or anything else; it is a white surface that is nothing else but a white surface (a colorless surface that is nothing else but a colorless surface). Or better still it exists, and this is sufficient.” (Piero Manzoni, “Free Dimension”, Op. Cit.) During a brief life tragically cut short at the age of thirty, Manzoni activated a revolutionary approach to making and viewing art, emphasizing the surface and its materiality as the true subject of the work. In the creation of the Achrome, he awakened an area of creativity in which the conceptual core of painting resides its own potential for self-generation.