Ocula Conversation Zac Langdon-Pole: Lines of Flight Over the last few years, New Zealand-born Berlin-based artist Zac Langdon-Pole has cultivated a practice of elegant, if at times uncanny, elisions. His recombinations of objects, words, and images—poetry, meteorite fragments, literary translations, furniture, photographs, mollusk shells—emphasise, with a fine-tuned lyricism, the...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
The renowned Italian artist Piero Manzoni emerged as a powerful voice for the avant-garde in the 1950s, debuting as an artist at the ‘4a Fiera mercato: Mostra d’arte contemporanea’ in 1956. A self-taught painter, his work heavily featured anthropomorphic silhouettes and the impressions of objects. He began making his white paintings – later named Achromes – in 1957, at first with rough gesso and then with kaolin, as well as with creased canvases or surfaces divided into squares.
In 1959, the artist began his series which experimented with the display of inflated white balloons. The results – Corpi d’aria (Bodies of Air) and Fiato d’artista (Artist’s Breath), where balloons were poised on a tripod or wooden plinth – extended the creative experimentation first visualized in the Achromes as Manzoni embarked upon works that used an entirely new visual language, reframing artistic interpretation. In July 1960, he presented Consumazione dell’arte / dinamica del pubblico / divorare l’arte in Milan, during which he offered the public hard-boiled eggs with his thumbprint on them. By 1961, Manzoni was signing actual people, turning them into ‘living sculptures,’ and awarding them with a certificate of authenticity.
Alongside his work as an abstract avant-garde painter, Manzoni contributed to and collaborated with numerous artist groups and initiatives. As his artistic activity intensified, he began participating in group shows and signing manifestos alongside other artists, including Enrico Baj, Guido Biasi, Ettore Sordini, and Angelo Verga. For a period of time he embraced the Movimento Arte Nucleare, before abandoning it in 1958.
On several occasions, he showed his work with Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani, and he collaborated with artists of the zero group in Düsseldorf and other European neo-avant-garde groups. In 1959, he founded the Galleria Azimut in Milan with Castellani, opening the gallery with an exhibition of his Linee (Lines). The pair simultaneously published two issues of the Azimuth magazine. The second issue (1960) included one of Manzoni’s seminal texts Libera dimensione or Free dimension.
Related Press Piero Manzoni and the Reinvention of Art Hyperallergic : 20 July 2019 The career of Italian artist Piero Manzoni was vanishingly brief; he had his first solo exhibition at the end of 1957, when he was 24, and died of a heart attack in his studio in 1963, five months before his thirtieth birthday.In those handful of years, his goal was nothing less than the regeneration of art as a force in contemporary life —...
Related Press Piero Manzoni Art in America : 1 June 2019 The two Piero Manzoni shows on view at Hauser & Wirth, Materials of His Time and Lines, inevitably bring to mind the ample exhibition Gagosian staged a decade ago.
