Piero Manzoni would have turned 80 this July. In honour of his work, and on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, Frankfurt’s Städel Museum presents some 100 works of the Italian post-war avant-gardist who passed away in 1963 at the young age of 29. Manzonis’ work, created over a mere 7 years, poked at the Post WWII consumerism that was transforming Italian society, while at the same time questioning the nature of the art work itself, anticipating conceptual art, and has influenced an entire generation of Italian artists pertaining to the Arte Povera movement.
Comprising a large number of seminal works shown in Germany for the first time, the exhibition includes Manzoni’s “Achromes” images, made with various white coloured elements, or his “sculture viventi” pieces, which master the human body as living artworks. Offering a multifarious in-depth insight into the artist’s radical oeuvre, the exhibition reflects Manzoni’s reputation as Italy’s enfant terrible and, concurrently, elucidates his role as “renovator” of contemporary art. His radical questioning of the nature of the art work was maybe most famously manifested in works such as his “merda d’artista”, which consists of 90 pieces of canned faeces (1961), and of which one alone sold for 52,000$ in the year 2000.
While the centrality of Mazoni’s oeuvre to conceptual art might be more appealing to art world professionals, Manzoni’s restaging of the human body as an art-generating mechanism is an important aspect that speaks to a wider audience. The exhibited works focus on Manzoni’s shifting between expanse and bodily elements, playing with various habiliments in which art evolves from immaterial, traditionally non-artistic components.
Manzoni is displayed here among fellow contemporaries such as Yves Klein or Lucio Fontanas, thus visually placing his work within a historical and practice-related context. His ruthlessness and agitation, however, are main traits that distinguish him from his contemporaries. The exhibition’s title “When Bodies Became Art” hints at the ambiguous work utilising human bodies as well as carcasses and sculptures and with this triggering a insurrectionist shift in the classical artistic sense.
Piero Manzoni When Bodies Become Art Städel Museum, Frankfurt June 26 – September 22, 2013
www.staedelmuseum.de