Piero Manzoni

The exhibition, produced in collaboration with Milan’s Fondazione Manzoni and curated by Paulo Venâncio Filho, gathers 28 different works from Piero Manzoni’s last years of life, which is also his most expressive phase. The show synthesizes his intense period of work from 1957 to 1963, when he died untimely at 29, by a heart attack.

Celebrated by his works that remained in the realm of ideas, Piero Manzoni (1933 – 1963, Italy) was bold when he experimented with different pigments and materials and attained fame, particularly for his series Merda d’Artista [Artist’s Shit], in which he defecated in 90 small cans and labeled them.

Curator Paulo Venâncio Filho classifies Manzoni’s works as clear, simple, affirmative, unequivocal. In the 1950s, the world was being transformed and rebuilt. Natural materials were replaced by new technologies and synthetic materials that took over daily life. Manzoni was interested in possibilities and experimented the time of resins and plastics by utilizing them on his works.