Piero Manzoni

Galerie Iris Clert, Paris

Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne 

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1968)

Thence by descent to the present owner 

Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein e.V. Karlsruhe, 5 Italiener: Bonalumi Ceroli Manzoni Munari Pistoletto, 1969, n.p., no. 23, incorrect dimensions (text) 

Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum; Mönchengladbach, Städtisches Museum; Hanover, Kunstverein Hannover; and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Piero Manzoni 1933-1963, 1969-70, p. 18 (Eindhoven), no. 21, incorrect dimensions (text) 

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: Catalogo Generale, Milan 1975, p. 118, no. 47, illustrated

Freddy Battino and Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni: Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 1991, p. 313, no. 509, illustrated

Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni: Catalogo Generale, Tomo Secondo, Milan 2004, p. 441, no. 311, illustrated 

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some faint cracks, a few scattered rubmarks, and some minor discolouration in places. There are some minor kaolin losses to the extreme outer edges, most notably to the top right and bottom right corners as visible in the catalogue illustration. There is some minor lifting to a corner of one of the canvas squares in the lower left quadrant. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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“…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 receptacle be emptied? Why shouldn’t this surface be freed? Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute light?”

Piero Manzoni,'Free Dimension' (1960) in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 130.

Executed between 1958 and 1959, when Piero Manzoni was at the apogee of his career, Achrome perfectly epitomises the essence of Manzoni’s artistic beliefs at a time of political ferment within Europe. The 1950s saw a universal reaction against the horrors of World War II, which led to a re-evaluation of the purposes of art itself. It was during this dramatic period that the Italian artist started looking into the purity of artistic expression. Unlike other pieces from this series – which adopted mediums such as cotton padding, acrylic resin, polystyrene, rabbit fur, folded fabrics and later gravel and bread rolls – this work arguably delivers the most textural simplicity and undisturbed clarity of the corpus. In Achrome, Manzoni accomplishes his ultimate goal: all external references have been totally removed and clarity is celebrated. As part of a series first initiated in 1958, the present work comes from a slightly later moment in 1959, in which the Achromes are distinguished by a grid. Composed of thirty intricately sewn canvases soaked in clean white terracotta, this piece demonstrates the clearness and height of non-colour striven for by the artist. Despite his use of simple and everyday materials such as canvas and kaolin, this work highlights Manzoni’s endeavour to realise an art entirely freed from external reference. In its horizontal gridded format the present work is comparable to examples held in major museum collections such as Tate, London; Museum Ludwig, Vienna; and Herning Art Museum, Denmark.

During his formative years, Manzoni was influenced deeply by Lucio Fontana, who he encountered frequently at Albisola Marina. From his mentor, Manzoni learned a “lesson on an attitude towards life, the will, the force to turn art into freedom of invention”; the outcome of which can clearly be seen here in Achrome (Piero Manzoni, 'Da Milano', Il Pensiero Nazionale, Vol. 13, No. 21, 1 November 1959, p. 40). Nonetheless, where monochromatic colour acted as a means for positioning Fontana’s gesture at the centre of the artwork, Manzoni instead looked to evacuate any chromatic value to block the illusional power of its participation. Moving away from Fontana’s Spatialism, and probably influenced by his encounter with Yves Klein’s work in the early 1957 show at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan (an exhibition of eleven monochrome blue paintings), Manzoni totally banished narrative content from painting and inaugurated the series of all-white works entitled Achrome.

Germano Celant once said that Piero Manzoni’s white surface seeks to “invent its own laws and creates fluidity of thought. It unravels and rewinds” (Germano Celant, ‘Piero Manzoni: The Body Infinite’ in: ibid., p. 28). Conceived as an act of negation, the first works in the Achrome series were made using gesso and later developed into canvases that were saturated with liquid kaolin (a soft china clay). Works such as the present Achrome epitomise this technique’s ability to eliminate brushstrokes and thus succeeds in removing the artist’s hand. Herein, the present work is  an exquisite example of Manzoni’s desire to create a space devoid of any image, material or colour to the point of achieving a desired ‘nothingness’.

In a brief career, cut short by his premature death, Piero Manzoni produced, in addition to the series of Achrome, a diverse oeuvre ranging from tubes containing paper marked only with a line, human bodies signed by the artist considered as living works of art, through to cans of his own excrement which deliberate on the Duchampian principles of artistic production. The present work however superbly accomplishes Manzoni’s celebrated central and most iconic aim to produce "images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are: to be" (Piero Manzoni, ‘For the Discovery of a Zone of Images’ in: op. cit., 1974, p. 17).