Known for his ironic and provocative approach to artistic production, Italian artist Piero Manzoni created a body of work that challenged conventional notions of art and its value. Irreverent and often humorous, his practice relied on an implicit criticism of the mass production and consumerism prevalent in postwar Italy. In his Artist’s Breath series, for example, he inflated balloons with his own breath and mounted them to a wooden base. In another series, he canned and sold his own excrement, priced according to its comparable weight in gold. For his Achrome series, Manzoni created painting-like objects, but did so without the need for paint or gesture. One example from this series, Achrome, 1960, is in Glenstone’s collection. The work appears white but is absent of any pigmentary color. Manzoni made the work by soaking the canvas in kaolin—a specialist clay used in the making of porcelain—leaving the wet clay to harden into textured, irregular folds.

–From the Glenstone Field Guide