Piero Manzoni

Galleria Marescalchi, Bologna
Private Collection, Bologna (acquired circa 1985)
Christie’s, Milan, 27 November 2007, Lot 366
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Tomo Secondo, Milan 2004, p. 556, no. 1101, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly darker in the original. Condition: Unexamined out of its frame, this work is in very good condition. All collaged elements are stable. The newspaper appears to have discoloured over time. There are some light handling marks and media accretions in places to the canvas. Close inspection reveals thin cracks to two of the wax stamps, and there is a short tear to the paper, towards the centre of the upper left quadrant. There is some light oxidation to the lead plaque, with an associated small accretion to the right. There is some very light canvas draw to the upper right corner, with an associated tiny speck of loss. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“Why shouldn’t this surface be freed? Why not seek to understand that art history is not the history of “painters”, but rather of discoveries and innovators? Alluding, expressing, representing, abstracting are nonexistent problems today. Form, color, dimensions do not make sense; for the artist, there is only the problem of conquering the most total freedom; barriers are a challenge, mental ones for the artist, like physical ones for the scientist.”

PIERO MANZONI

quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Manzoni Azimut, November 2011 – January 2012, pp. 131


Simultaneously mysterious and revealing, Piero Manzoni’s Achrome from circa 1962 is a fascinating document from the oeuvre of one of the most important post-war artists. Bringing together two of the key art-historical trends of his time - post-war abstraction and early conceptual art - the work captures not only Manzoni’s influential practice, but indeed represents the most significant developments in art history in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

During his impressive but short career, Manzoni’s work reflected the lessons of Lucio Fontana, whose radical elevation of painting to an autonomous, three-dimensional object had a profound influence throughout Europe. As demonstrated by Achrome, Manzoni worked with the same material approach that brought together the art-historical categories of painting and sculpture into a new dimension - in this case by attaching an object onto a plain white canvas. This deceptively simple action not only continues Fontana’s break-through lesson, but in fact takes it a step further. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Manzoni was interested not just in transforming his paintings into objects, but in introducing actual objects into the realm of art.

Indeed, Manzoni’s use of packaged objects reverberates with the resurgence of interest in Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ready-made, which laid the foundations for conceptual art in the 1960s. The inclusion of everyday objects in Achrome is a step away from Fontana’s metaphysical understanding of space into the reality of actual objects that is also found in Robert Rauschenberg’s combines – and which would have a radical influence on subsequent generations of artists.

However, like the conceptual art of Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp, the present work functions not only on a material level, but also plays on the mystification of art that conceptualism often attempts to unveil. Whilst Achrome is plainly revealing in the matter-of-fact presentation of an ordinary wrapped package, it inevitably makes one wonder what could be inside – as with Manzoni’s famous work Merda d’artista. This sense of mystery adds an additional layer of narrative and makes Achrome not only a highly relevant work within the context of post-war abstraction, but indeed also within the emerging interest in the ready-made and conceptual art.