BIOGRAPHY

1957 ALBISOLA MARINA AND AGAINST THE STYLE

On the 1st of August, he distributed the manifesto “Albisola Marina”, published on the occasion of a group show in the Ligurian town, signed by Manzoni with Biasi, Colucci, Sordini and Verga, in which he wrote: “Despite every implausibility, our work declares the most lucid awareness of our physical life. In contrast with every abstraction and every vain decorativism, we create not an ideal vision but a kind of plastic translation of the most intimate emotions of our consciousness: art thus has a way of becoming a natural and spontaneous continuation of our psycho-biological processes, an offshoot our very organic life which organizes itself through the careful verification of consciousness and the immaculate wonder of the senses. Our only ideal is therefore a Reality.”

On the 12th of October Manzoni exhibited at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan in Arte Nucleare 1957, the occasion on which for the first time he endorsed a manifesto that he himself had not written, “Contro lo stile” (Against the Style) (signed by Arman, Baj, Bemporad, Bertini, Calonne, Chapmans, Colucci, Dangelo, De Miceli, D’Haese, Hoeber, Hundertwasser, Klein, Koenig, Manzoni, Nando, Noiret, A and G. Pomodoro, Restany, Saura, Sordini, Vandercam and Verga), but by the 9th of November he was already organizing the Mostra di giovani pittori al Bar Jamaica (Exhibition of young painters at the Bar Jamaica), taking up a polemical position against the San Fedele prize presented in a manifesto he signed with Biasi, Aldo Calvi, Silvio Pasotti, Antonio Recalcati, Sordini, Verga and Alberto Zilocchi.

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Manifesto “Albisola Marina”, 1957

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Arte Nucleare 1957, Galleria San Fedele, Milan, 1957

Piero Manzoni at the exhibition Arte Nucleare 1957, Galleria San Fedele, Milan, 1957

L’invincible Jean (The invincible Jean), 1957, oil and tar on canvas, 60 × 50 cm