Lot description
Piero Manzoni 1933-1963 ACHROME kaolin on canvas 81 by 61 cm. 32 by 24 in. Executed in 1958. Provenance Galleria Notizie, Turin Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the early 1960s Literature Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Milan 1975, p. 111, no. 20 cq, illustrated Freddy Battino & Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni Catalogue Raisonne, Milan 1991, p. 322, no. 542 BM, illustrated The Achromes series embodies Piero Manzoni's life-long preoccupation with a new way of approaching the painted surface. His aim was to challenge and overcome the concept of the painting as a surface on to which to express the subject's feeling and emotions. Manzoni's theoretical and pictorial answer to this quest, shared by many other artists at the time such as Yves Klein and Enrico Castellani, was the Achrome, a painting completely devoid of colour, from which the intervention of the artist was reduced to a minimum. Achrome, executed in 1958, is a white, unemotive, neutral surface, which avoids and denies imagery in favour of a more radical purity. To obtain it, Manzoni did not paint the canvas, but coated it with kaolin. It is through the drying process that the painting achieved its final stage. "Manzoni's Achrome aspired to cut the umbilical cord between artefact and artificier; it aimed at reducing art's dependency on the artist... the Achrome presents no hue, no chromatic memory at all, nothing that might recall nature or the artist's own passions." (Germano Celant in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Piero Manzoni, 1998, p. 22)
