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Dimensions: 44 3/4 x 56 7/8 in. 113.5 x 144.5 cm.
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Provenance: Heiner and Rosemarie Ruths, Weissenhorn
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1968
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Literature: Freddy Battino & Luca Palazzoli, Piero Manzoni Catalogue Raisonné, Milan, 1991, cat. no. 468 BM, p. 303, illustrated
Germano Celant, Piero Manzoni Catalogo Generale, Vol. II, Milan, 2004, cat. no. 324, p. 443, illustrated
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Notes: Executed in 1958.
PROPERTY FROM THE HELGA AND WALTHER LAUFFS COLLECTION
Manzoni's Achrome is a landmark expression of painting as purity. Preceding Minimalism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera, Achrome achieves its primal condition as 'object' by intentionally denouncing any and all external intrusions. Manzoni rejected figuration and narrative painting which was predominant in Western Art from the Renaissance through to the 19υth century. Best understood as a pure signifier, Manzoni's Achrome operates as a self-referential, fully contained entity that reaches its final state without biographical or cultural interventions. Its materiality, while manipulated, is not the result of layers of impasto but of an autonomy granted by the creative process itself; a physical feature of liquid kaolin and glue left to dry. As a 'virgin' space, the goal of the achrome is: "to render a surface completely white (integrally colorless and neutral) far beyond any pictorial phenomenon or any intervention by the artist. A white that is not a polar landscape, not a material in evolution or a beautiful material, not a sensation or a symbol or anything else, just a white surface that is simply a white surface and nothing else. Better than that: a surface that simply is: (to be complete and become pure)." (Piero Manzoni in 1960 as cited in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Piero Manzoni: Paintings, reliefs and objects, 1974, p. 46-47) Diametrically opposed to Action Painting with its emphasis on painterly gesture and the artist's subconscious, Achrome endures as a model of symmetry and simplicity. Manzoni pleated the canvas surface, then coated it with kaolin, and it is the drying process that determined the final form of the work of art. Ultimately, the achromes' fluid unfolding and refolding of creases in repeated cascading patterns brings Manzoni closer than any of his contemporaries to achieving an organic sensibility.
Executed in 1958, by a then twenty-five year old, Achrome belongs to the first group of kaolin works where a mature density replaces tentative experimental folds. On its fiftieth anniversary, Achrome continues to exude absolute conceptual purity.
