PIERO MANZONI (1933-1963)

Created in 1960, Uovo Scultura n. 29 (Egg Sculpture No. 29) is part of one of Piero Manzoni’s most iconic bodies of work. It consists of a single hard-boiled egg, adorned with Manzoni’s thumbprint in black ink. Enshrined in a small wooden box lined with cotton wool, the egg resembles a precious relic, and in many senses that’s precisely what it is: it is an artefact of Manzoni’s famous piece of performance art Consumazione dell’arte dinamica del pubblico divorare l’arte (Consumption of Art by the Art-Devouring Public), held in Milan on 21 July 1960. In this communion-like ceremony, Manzoni ‘consecrated’ a number of eggs with his inked thumbprint. After consuming several himself, he invited members of the public to eat the eggs. The performance lasted exactly seventy minutes, the duration of a Catholic mass. In a typically radical and potent statement, Manzoni posited the ingestion of art as a secular eucharist. His eggs – like Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ – were transformed not in their substance, but through the audience’s faith in the transubstantiative magic of the artistic act.

Manzoni’s entire oeuvre can be seen as a critique of the traditional separation between art and everyday life, with the body as its interface. The very literal expressions of the body in his famed Artist’s Breath (1960) and Artist’s Shit (1961) are only the most provocative among his varied engagements with the conferral of value upon the artistic product. He signed people’s bodies to turn them into works of art; he made plinths for people to stand on that transformed them into living sculptures; his Socle du monde (1961), a plinth inverted as if to support the earth, declared the entire world an artwork. Seamlessly marrying the physical and the spiritual, works like Uovo Scultura n. 29 (Egg Sculpture No. 29) stand among the most elegant records of Manzoni’s ritual-conceptual acts. The artist’s ovoid thumbprint-signature neatly inhabits the form of the egg, while the egg itself taps into an ancient vein of artistic symbolism. Its resonance as a sacred icon of fertility, purity and rebirth – an idea that Manzoni’s contemporary Lucio Fontana would explore in his Fine di Dio series of 1963-64 – perfectly encapsulates Manzoni’s vision of art created anew.