NEW YORK, NY.- Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan, and Hauser & Wirth jointly announced today the gallery’s exclusive worldwide representation of renowned late Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963).

Manzoni emerged as a powerful voice for the avant garde in the 1950s, during a moment of social upheaval in Europe caused by the rapid growth of postwar industry and technology. During a brief but influential career that ended with his untimely death from a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 29, Manzoni evolved from a self-taught abstract painter into a change agent and engineer of new ideas about artistic practice. Together with Enrico Castellani he founded Azimut gallery and ‘Azimuth’ magazine (1959 – 1960), intended to forge an international dialogue and unite artistic movements across Italy and the rest of Europe. Among those published in ‘Azimuth’ magazine were Samuel Beckett, Gillo Dorfles, Yves Klein, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely.

Manzoni initiated his radical Achromes (literally translated as ‘without colour’ or ‘neutral’) series initially with gesso and then with kaolin and creased canvases in 1957 / 1958, marking the beginning of a varied and sustained investigation into aesthetic questions that would last until his death. The early Achromes were influenced in part by the experiments of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. But Manzoni pushed their hypotheses further, embarking upon works that used an entirely new visual language and reframed artistic interpretation. His tireless quest to understand the artist’s role in the art making process prompted conceptual leaps and experiments in early performance art.

Hauser & Wirth will exhibit an iconic work from Manzoni’s Achromes series in their booth at the Art Basel fair, 15 – 18 June 2017. A major survey exhibition of the artist’s work will take place in late 2018 at the gallery’s 22nd Street New York City location. The gallery will also support the Fondazione in preparing a new catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, expected to be published online in the next two years.

Marc Payot, Hauser & Wirth Partner and Vice-President, comments: ‘We are honoured and thrilled to begin working with the Fondazione Piero Manzoni. He was a master of innovation whose intrepid pursuit of new forms of creative expression and fierce intelligence continue to exert influence now. Together with the foundation’s Director, Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, we look forward to further advancing understanding of the artist’s contributions to the evolution of modern and contemporary art, through new exhibitions, publications, and special projects focused on Manzoni’s rigorous and exquisitely original oeuvre.’

Piero Manzoni was born in the Italian village of Soncino in 1933. He studied Law at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan until 1954 and Philosophy in Rome, before devoting himself to his artistic career the following year. Working in Milan in the late 1950s, Manzoni found himself at the epicenter of an international creative network. Harnessing the energy of a continent grappling with the aftermath of the Second World War and seeking to liberate culture from the traditions that no longer had resonance for the time, Manzoni emerged as an instrumental figure in the pursuit and encouragement of new thinking.

Manzoni was a driving force in connecting collaborators in thought and promoting new ideas. In addition to his ‘Azimuth’ and Azimut initiatives (1959 – 1960), he was in contact with a number of artists and movements including Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism, Enrico Baj’s Movimento Arte Nucleare, Vincenzo Agnetti’s ‘Arte-no’, Heinz Mack’s Zero group and Henk Peeters’s Nul. He accepted and encouraged multiple approaches to the avant garde, valuing the shared desire to upend traditional and outmoded concepts of art.

In his radical Achromes series (1957 – 1959), Manzoni often employed kaolin, a liquid used in making ceramic, to create a white – and therefore neutral – surface. Manzoni exploited the malleable properties of kaolin in order to manipulate the surface of a canvas into a series of creases. He would drape kaolin-soaked fabric of his canvas, letting the drying and crystallizing process determine the final form of the work.

Despite their minimal and humble nature, the Achromes exert an intense expressive power in their dynamic and vibrant surface texture. In Achromes experiments of 1960 – 1962, Manzoni incorporated other, more diverse materials, moving even further away from the conventions of painting. He began using cotton balls, felt, polystyrene and phosphorescent paint, cobalt chloride, rabbit fur, synthetic fibres, stones, and even bread. The multiplicity of materials Manzoni used indicates his quest to represent the ‘absolute’ or ‘infinite’ capabilities of a work of art.

With his 1959 series Lines, Manzoni engaged with issues of time and space. For each of these works, he traced a line on a strip of paper then packaged it in a cardboard cylinder labelled with the measurement of the line’s exact length. His initial semi-automatic gesture was therefore rendered as a conceptual action. The longest line of this series was recorded on 4 July 1960 in Herning, Denmark, measuring 7,200 metres and sealed in a zinc and lead cylinder. The series culminated in ‘Line of Infinite Length’ (1960), a pure wooden cylinder bearing a label containing the work’s title.

Manzoni continued his experimentations into representing the infinite in a series of ‘pneumatic sculptures’ made from white balloons, titled Bodies of Air (1959 – 1960). Manzoni saw the potential in the circular shape for it to expand to a ‘maximum of infinity’. In Bodies of Air and later with Artist’s Breath, Manzoni focused on the subject of the artist’s presence in the completed work of art: these sculptures could be purchased deflated or inflated with the breath of the artist.

In a series titled Egg Sculptures, Manzoni transformed eggs into works of art by signing them with his thumbprint. At his Azimut gallery, Manzoni engineered an exhibition/event titled ‘Consumption of the art / Dynamic of the public / Devour art’ (1960), in which visitors consumed the eggs as a collective performance to create a more direct relationship between work and viewer.

In 1961 he began a related body of work, marking people with his signature, thus transforming them into ‘living sculptures’. His relentless investigation into questions about the artist’s presence culminated in the Artist’s Shit series, whereby 90 tin cans, bearing their title on a label in four languages, were sold for the equivalent of their weight in gold.

The concept of totality in Manzoni’s work eventually led him to realize ‘Socle du Monde’ (1961). In this groundbreaking work, he inverted the concept of a plinth as a platform for a sculpture – turning a metal base upside down, Manzoni inferred that it acted as a support for the Earth, thus transforming the entire world into a work of art.

The work of Piero Manzoni has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, including retrospectives at the GNAM – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1971); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1991); Serpentine Gallery, London (1998); MADRE – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (2007); Palazzo Reale, Milan (2014); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo (2015), and Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Lausanne (2016).

His work is included in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Museo del 900, Milan; HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.