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The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne is presenting the first museum exhibition in Switzerland of the work of Piero Manzoni (1933–1963). Centred on the Achromes – the white monochromes the artist worked on during his brief career (1957–1963) – the exhibition comprises 70 outstanding works ranging from the famous wrinkled canvases to the final polystyrene pieces, not to mention his few sculptures and works on paper.
A major figure on the art scene of the 1950s–1960s, Manzoni enjoys the same status as Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein as one of the most innovative artists of the time. Like them he experimented with monochrome, but took the concept further by opting for the a-chromatic: the very absence of colour.
Driven by a determination to free the work of art from the painterly tradition and from the action-painting approach that dominated postwar Informal art and Lyrical Abstraction, he opted for minimal types of intervention (folding, coating, sewing) that gave rise to simple forms (pleats, lines, grids), and for natural and synthetic white materials including wrinkled canvas soaked in white clay solution, cotton wool, synthetic fur, bread rolls and polystyrene pellets. Leaving these materials free to react in their own specific ways, he transformed the picture into a space of infinite possibilities.