Piero Manzoni was born in Soncino in 1933 and grew up in Milan. In 1956, he debuted in Soncino and then at the San Fedele Painting Prize in Milan, where he exhibited early paintings featuring anthropomorphic shapes. He began his exhibition activity, designed posters with other artists, and joined the Nuclear Art Movement. Between 1957 and 1958, he created his first Achromes using plaster and later kaolin, with wrinkled or checkered canvases. He exhibited alongside Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani and collaborated with artists from various European neo-avant-garde movements.

In 1959, he co-founded the magazine Azimuth with Castellani and opened the Azimut gallery in Milan, inaugurating it with his exhibition Linee. He produced the series Corpi d’aria and Fiato d’artista. In 1960, he traveled to Herning where he experimented with unusual materials. He continued producing Achromes using absorbent cotton, phosphorescent polystyrene, and cobalt chloride, and presented an event in Milan where the audience ate hard-boiled eggs imprinted with his fingerprint.

From 1961, he created new Achromes using fiberglass and synthetic fibers, plush, bread, straw, packing paper, stones, and polystyrene pellets, and began signing people, turning them into Living Sculptures accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity. He produced Basi magiche and 90 tins of Artist’s Shit. Returning to Herning in 1961, he presented the Base del Mondo, an inverted pedestal ideally supporting the Earth as a work of art.

Manzoni participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. On February 6, 1963, Piero Manzoni died of a heart attack in his studio in Milan.