Piero Manzoni valuation
Made canvases with nothing on them, signed people as living sculpture, and tinned his own excrement.
Piero Manzoni was born at Soncino in 1933 into a landowning family and produced everything he is known for in about six years.
What a work by Piero Manzoni is worth
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Bio
Piero Manzoni was born at Soncino in 1933 into a landowning family and produced everything he is known for in about six years. The Achromes are canvases soaked in kaolin and left white, later made in cotton wool, fibreglass, bread rolls and rabbit fur — pictures emptied of image, colour and gesture. He drew Lines on paper rolls and sealed them in tubes so they could not be seen. He signed people and issued them certificates of authenticity as works of art, sold his breath in balloons, and in 1961 produced ninety numbered tins labelled Artist's Shit. He died of a heart attack in 1963, at twenty-nine.
A short life and a small catalogue, and one of the most heavily faked names of the post-war period, which means the Fondazione Piero Manzoni in Milan and its archive are not a formality but the starting point for any enquiry. The Achromes are white and unpainted and are therefore uniquely unforgiving in condition terms — any soiling is the work's whole surface. The kaolin is friable. Certificates, particularly for the conceptual works, are the work itself in some cases, so the paperwork is the object.
Klein, Azimut and the Bodies of Air
Manzoni was self-taught and first exhibited at the castle in Soncino in 1956. Yves Klein's exhibition of blue monochromes at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in January 1957 changed his work, and the Achromes began that year. In 1959 he and Enrico Castellani founded the Azimut gallery in Milan, which opened with 12 Linee in December 1959 and showed Corpi d'aria, an edition of 45 balloons on tripods, in May 1960.
Other works from those years include editions of his thumbprint and the printed Declarations of Authenticity of 1961 and 1962. Of the kaolin Achromes, only nine are large reliefs of folded cloth; most are canvases with horizontal folds or squares of coated canvas. For any Achrome, the support and material, whether kaolin, cotton wool, fibreglass or bread, should be recorded exactly.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
