Both a response to and an extension of the Spatialist explorations of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri's self-asserting material works and the immateriality and mysticism of Yves Klein's monochromes, Manzoni Achromes were self-defining works of art that asserted only their own surfaces - surfaces from which all other extraneous detail, artifice and style had been eliminated. Described by Manzoni, who was greatly inspired by the psychoanalytical writings of Freud and Jung at this time, as 'totems', his Achromes were essentially non-pictures - demonstrably real material presences that articulated only their own formal and material properties. In this, they were works that finally, and irreparably, broke down the illusive and conceptual space that up until this point had always traditionally surrounded the picture plane. At the same time, they were works of art that began to operate as real, unaesthetic concepts within the real, physical space of the viewer and the world around them. Marking the beginning of a process of integration between art and life, the Achrome was therefore, a work that signaled the end of the idea of the art-object, and in this respect, represented the culmination of the anti-material tendency embodied in Fontana's Spatialist aesthetic and also the 'immateriality' of Klein's work. Going beyond these earlier precedents, the Achromes were works that defined what Manzoni saw as an ultimate 'zone' of freedom and the final liberation of art from style. 'We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental scenography' Manzoni insisted. 'It is the arena of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain or express, but only for that which they are.' (Piero Manzoni, For the Discovery of a Zone of Images. 1957.)

For an artist who insisted on the liberation of art from style however, Manzoni's uniquely 'styleless' creations nevertheless often betray the artist's own magnificent and unerring sense of style. The Achromes of 1957-58 and 1958-59 here for example, are two very different manifestations of the same autonomous and self-defining, 'styleless' concept. While one, with its tight, serially-repeated kaolin-coated pleats forms a dramatic line of self-asserting material texture across the centre of the otherwise flat white canvas in a manner that anticipates the simplicity of much Minimalist art, the loose, informel-like folds of the other, slightly earlier Achrome seem to embrace a sumptuous Baroquelike eloquence. The quiet, innate and sober elegance of both these works also permeates many of Manzoni's creations even as they gradually progressed away from materiality and almost any intervention by the artist's hand altogether and eventually transcended the objecthood of art entirely to become mere gestures and/or concepts. From the endless linee (lines), his thumb-printed series of eggs, balloons of his own breath and even mass-produced tins of 'merda d'artista' (his own shit) to ever more expansive and open creations such as the signing of people as living artworks or his 'socle du monde' (a simple pedestal that transformed the entire world into a ready-made work of art), the cool elegance of Manzoni's understated 'style' remained visible within all his work.