Piero Manzoni

Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, born in Soncino in the province of Cremona on July 13, 1933, was an Italian artist known for his ironic take on avant-garde art. He was the eldest of five children of Egisto Manzoni and Valeria Meroni; his full name was Count Meroni Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo. Through his sister Elena, he was the uncle of artist Pippa Bacca.

Entirely self-taught, he first exhibited at age 23 in August 1956 at Soncino's Castle. His early work was broadly gestural, influenced by Milanese Nuclear Art figures like Enrico Baj. From around 1957 until his death, his work questioned and satirized the status of the art object as conceived throughout modernism, with influences from Marcel Duchamp, Ben Vautier, and Yves Klein.

Achromes

Manzoni’s approach changed after visiting Yves Klein’s January 1957 exhibition Epoca Blu at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, which featured 11 identical blue monochromes. By the end of that year, he abandoned Art Informel influences to create works responding directly to Klein’s monochromes: the Achromes. These looked white but were actually colorless, using pigments and materials like gesso-coated canvases (1957–1958) and kaolin clay.

The kaolin works were clay-covered canvases folded horizontally or with cut-out squares of clay-coated canvas adhered to the surface; he made only nine large-scale relief paintings of folded cloth. Influences also included Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Robert Rauschenberg, who painted neutral white canvases in 1951. Later Achromes used white cotton wool, fiberglass, rabbit skin, and bread rolls, and he experimented with phosphorescent paint and cobalt chloride so colors would shift over time.

Azimut Gallery

In 1959, Manzoni co-founded the Azimut Gallery in Milan with artist Enrico Castellani, staging revolutionary exhibitions of multiples. The first, 12 Linee (12 Lines), occurred in December 1959, followed by Corpi d’Aria (Bodies of Air) in May 1960—an edition of 45 balloons on tripods that buyers or the artist could inflate, depending on the price. In July 1960, he presented Consumption of Art by the Art-Devouring Public: he hard-boiled 70 eggs, printed his thumbprint on them, ate several himself, and handed the rest to the audience to eat.

These eggs were titled Uova con impronta (Egg With Thumbprint). This was Manzoni’s last exhibition at Azimuth; the gallery closed when its lease expired. The invitation listed the Gallery Azimut as the location, but the event took place at the Studio Filmgiornale Sedi in Milan, further complicating the expected role and space of art.

Artist's Breath

Contemporaneously with Corpi d’Aria, Manzoni produced Fiato d’Artista (Artist’s Breaths): red, white, or blue balloons inflated and attached to a wooden base inscribed “Piero Manzoni—Artist’s Breath.” These works continued his obsession with physical limits, parodied the art world’s fixation on permanence, and served as a poignant memento mori.

Artist's Shit

In May 1961, Manzoni created 90 small cans sealed with the text Merda d’Artista (Artist’s Shit). Each 30-gram can was priced by weight based on the current gold value (about $1.12 a gram in 1960). The contents remain disputed—opening a can would destroy its value, and theories include speculation it is plaster.

Over time, the cans spread to collections worldwide and fetched large prices far outstripping inflation. A tin sold for €124,000 at Sotheby’s on May 23, 2007; in October 2008, tin 83 sold for £97,250 at Sotheby’s; on October 16, 2015, tin 54 sold at Christie’s for £182,500. The work is described as a joke, a parody of the art market, and a critique of consumerism and its waste.

Manzoni’s work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism transforming Italian society during the post-World War II economic miracle. Italian artists like Manzoni navigated the new economic and material order of post-war Europe through inventive practices crossing geographic, artistic, and cultural borders.

His work anticipated and directly influenced a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition in Genoa in 1967. Manzoni died of a myocardial infarction in his Milan studio on February 6, 1963. His contemporary Ben Vautier signed Manzoni’s death certificate, declaring it a work of art.