Curated by Paulo Venancio Filho

Piero Manzoni’s influence is as broad as his career was short. This exhibition will include approximately thirty works spanning 1958 to 1963, six of the artist’s eight years of output (he died in 1963 at the age of twenty-nine). In addition to his Dada-inflected works, such as Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), 1961, the show will highlight the artist’s expansion of the monochrome paradigm and his proto-Conceptualist gestures. Like his peers the Nouveaux Réalistes and the Group Zero artists, Manzoni attacked the notion of the expressive subject. Accompanied by a catalogue with an essay penned by the curator, this careful selection of works offers a closer look at Manzoni’s experimentation with materials, including polystyrene foam, bread rolls, and synthetic fibers, as situated within his critique of abstraction as an empty fiction.

— Kaira M. Cabañas