Piero Manzoni

Featuring a luxurious faux-leather binding, Piero Manzoni: Writings on Art features 25 texts by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933–63), spanning from 1956 to 1963, the year of the artist’s premature death by heart attack.

Writing during the Italian economic miracle of the ’50s and ’60s, Manzoni's essays and manifestos represent his response to the state of midcentury Italian art and art writing. Selected by art historian Gaspare Luigi Marcone, all writings have been either translated into English for the first time or newly translated. Each text is accompanied by extensive archival images and contextualized with editorial commentary.

The book features a foreword by the Piero Manzoni Foundation’s director, Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, and a newly commissioned essay by one of today’s best-known art historians, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.

Throughout his brief yet influential career, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni (1933–63) maintained strong ties to the Netherlands. This book explores this relationship, drawing connections between Manzoni’s avant-garde paintings, sculptures and conceptual works with such groups as the Dutch Nul group and the ZERO movement.

This two-volume publication highlights two key threads in the work of artist Piero Manzoni (1933–63). Materials covers Manzoni’s years of prolific creation leading up to his untimely death, during which time he experimented with a wide variety of materials in his paintings, including sewn cloth, cotton wool, fiberglass, synthetic and natural fur, straw, cobalt chloride, stones, fluorescent polystyrene, pellets, packaging and more.

Lines delves into the eponymous body of work, which is of fundamental importance to his well-known Achromes—paintings without color, which aimed to strip his work of any trace of expression.

Extensively illustrated, both volumes feature several art historical essays alongside a host of archival material, making this one of the most comprehensive sources on the artist to date.

Piero Manzoni was the enfant terrible of the post-war Italian avant-garde before his untimely death in Milan in 1963 at the age of just twenty-nine. Curated by Germano Celant, the artist’s premier scholar and author of the two editions of the Manzoni catalogues raisonné’s (Milan, 1975 and Milan, 2004), this stunning catalogue spans Manzoni’s entire oeuvre, including works belonging to the Manzoni archives as well as several international museums and private collections. In addition, it presents several works by Manzoni’s American and European contemporaries. Manzoni’s alignments and responses to other artists active at the time, from Robert Rauschenberg to Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana to Robert Ryman, and Cy Twombly to Jasper Johns, demonstrate his own decisive contribution to the art of the late fifties and early sixties. The book is published on the occasion of the first complete retrospective in the U.S. on this artist, installed at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, from January 24 to March 7, 2009. A must-have for every conceptual art fan.

Germano Celant (born Genoa, 1940) has a PhD in contemporary art and theory and is internationally acknowledged for his theories on Arte Povera. Additionally, he is the author of more than one hundred publications, including both books and catalogues. He is also the curator of hundreds of exhibitions in the most prominent international museums and institutions worldwide.

Created in collaboration with the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni (Onlus) this volume is the first complete cataloging of the work of Manzoni.

A major figure in the art scene of Europe in the late 20th century, Manzoni interpreted the cultural experiences of his time and mixed and matched them, furiously inventing a vast variety of found materials and media, from cotton to “shit,” kaolin to polystyrene, and fiberglass to the human body.

Manzoni (1933-1963) created an immense oevure in an all-too-brief career. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he persisted in building an art that lay outside of trends and labels: an alchemistic, anarchistic art, constantly ready to divest traditional aesthetic values, seeking a complete reinterpretation of the world. This two-volume catalog is no less than due recognition of Manzoni's courage and genius.