Piero Manzoni
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. 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.
If you own a work by Piero Manzoni
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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