Finestre Sull'arte (English): Piero Manzoni Foundation and Hauser & Wirth donate two immersive environments by Piero Manzoni to Magazzino Italian Art

Magazzino Italian Art (Cold Spring, New York) announces that it has received the gift of two life-size immersive environments designed by Piero Manzoni in 1961, thanks to the generosity of the Piero Manzoni Foundation and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery. The two works will be presented together with a selection of the artist’s works from American collections in the exhibition Piero Manzoni: Total Space, curated by Nicola Lucchi (director of Education and Research Center at Magazzino Italian Art), open to the public from Sept. 8, 2025 to March 23, 2026.

As early as 1957, Manzoni had embarked on a quest for a “new language” and “total transformation,” beginning to create the Achromes: works in plaster on canvas in which white had no allusive or symbolic value, but was a colorless surface. The series then expanded with different materials-from kaolin to absorbent cotton, styrofoam to synthetic fibers and fur-in an attempt to create colorless spaces, free of any figurative suggestion.

In 1961, driven by a desire to take a further step in the art of “total space,” Manzoni wrote to his friend Henk Peeters (1925-2013), a Dutch artist of the Zero group, hypothesizing the creation of two rooms: one entirely covered in white fur, the other in phosphorescent paint. Left unfinished due to his untimely death in 1963, these works saw new life in 2019, when the Piero Manzoni Foundation and Hauser & Wirth commissioned New York architect Stephanie Goto to realize those designs. The rooms were then presented the same year in the exhibitions Piero Manzoni: Materials of His Time at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, curated by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, director of the Piero Manzoni Foundation, and Piero Manzoni: Lines, Materials of His Time at Hauser & Wirth in New York.