The main stages of Piero Manzoni's art analyzed in an exhibition in Florence

The exhibition dedicated to Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 - Milan, 1963) at the Museo Novecento in Florence is part of the Solo exhibition cycle, conceived by the museum’s artistic director Sergio Risaliti and intended as a presentation of some of the great masters of the 20th century.

Until December 13, 2018, in fact, the second exhibition of the project is underway: the first had been dedicated to Emilio Vedova, now the public can get to know an artist whose collections are not present in the Florentine civic collections.

The exhibition offers an excursus on the most significant stages of Manzoni’s research: From the famous Achromes, made from 1957 to the end of his artistic activity, to the Lines conceived from 1959 onward (recall the 7200-meter Line made in about three hours on July 4, 1960 in Herning, Denmark, and the Line of Infinite Length made in several examples in 1960); the series of the 45 Air Bodies, Artist’s Breath, the performance Consummation of Art Dynamics of the public Devouring Art made on July 21, 1960, the Egg Sculptures. Plus the famous 90Boxes of Artist’s Shit, the Magic Bases, the cycle of Living Sculptures. The exhibition is completed by an appendix on the exhibition"Monochrome," a group show held at Galleria Il Fiore in Florence in January 1963, which constitutes, most likely, the last Italian exhibition in which Manzoni participated before his untimely death in the same year.

The Solo - Piero Manzoni exhibition is curated by Gaspare Luigi Marcone and is organized in collaboration with the Piero Manzoni Foundation of Milan.

“Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the so-called economic miracle, Manzoni performed his experimental miracles. An ’unclassifiable’ artist who continuously offers critical stimuli and research hypotheses. A research punctuated by dialectical polarities: concept/object, material/immaterial, interior/exterior, irony/rigor, magic/science, finite/infinite, everything/thing. From Lines to ’bodily’ works such as Air Bodies, Sculpture Eggs and Artist’s Shit, Manzoni redefined the idea of ’making art’; his path is marked by these ’concept-objects,’ works ’’boxed in,’’ mysterious and ironic but of absolute depth; they are not just ’’simple provocations,’’ the artist has always operated in a more absolute and totalizing way. Together with a constant theoretical activity, his operations have paved the way for many experiments of the following years on a national and international level,” states the curator.

On the Solo project Sergio Risaliti adds, “At regular intervals, the Museo Novecento focuses on the figure of a single artist, choosing to narrate a peculiar aspect of his career through the exhibition of one or more works present in the collections of the City of Florence or on loan from other public or private collections. These are exhibition ”solos“ in which the selection of the chosen works responds to an innovative critical slant, the result of research and reflection work involving some of the best art historians and curators of the new generation. After the one on Emilio Vedova we are proud to inaugurate the first ’monographic project’ on Piero Manzoni in a museum space in Florence focused on the ’objects’-or rather the ’concept-objects’-that the artist produced from 1959 to 1962. A pure artist and pure theorist - physical/behavioral and mental/philosophical in nature - as evidenced by his many writings that appeared in the form of diaries, manifestos and articles, with his actions, experimentations, communicative and reproduction techniques, Manzoni shifted into an unprecedented future the history of art, which, after his inventions and forays, was no longer what it used to be.”

For info: www.museonovecento.it

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The main stages of Piero Manzoni's art analyzed in an exhibition in Florence

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