Manzoni

Thirty years of life and seven of work, a major player on the artistic scene of the second half of the 20th century, Piero Manzoni saw and interpreted the cultural experiences of his time, both Italian and international, and revisited them, all mixed and matched with a vast variety of materials: from cottons to “shit”, from kaolin to polystyrene, from fibreglass to the human body.
Piero Manzoni’s all too brief yet intellectually scandalous existence unfolded in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Milan, a city that with his work, the “achrome”, the artist opened up to even the most innovative experimentations of the European avant-garde. He produced an art that lay outside of trends and labels, an alchemistic, anarchistic art, constantly ready to divest traditional aesthetic values, seeking a complete recataloguing of the world.

Created in collaboration with the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni – Onlus, this volume is the first complete cataloguing of the work of Piero Manzoni (Soncino 1933 – Milan 1963).
Commissioned by the artist’s heirs, Germano Celant documents all of Manzoni’s creative digressions, cataloguing, by means of direct inspection and scientific analysis, all the works in existence, which total 1229 published works, over 400 of which reproduced in colour.