Piero Manzoni

When Bodies Became Art

Even fifty years after his death at young age, the work of Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) is still epochal and avant-garde; he is without doubt the most significant postwar Italian artist. The comprehensive publication accompanies the first large-scale retrospective of the artist’s work ever held in Germany. Manzoni was interested in the forms of artistic expression in the interstice between art informel and the emergence of a new concept of art that was moving into different areas of everyday life, between early modern art and the neo-avantgarde. The exhibition catalogue presents the multi-faceted, corporal and sensual work of the Italian artist, which both stimulated and made a considerable contribution to the radical changes that took place in the world or art in the early 1960s.