Piero Manzoni, "Manzoni: A Retrospective," Gagosian Gallery, through March 21

The cherubic mug, the jaunty angle at which the half-smoked cigarette dangles from his mouth, the mischievous, squinty gaze — you get the feeling from Ugo Mulas’s 1959 photograph of Piero Manzoni, which greets visitors to the current Manzoni retrospective at Gagosian Gallery, that the Italian artist never grew up. And in a way he didn’t — two years after plopping squarely on the art world map by canning his own crap in 1961, he died at age 29 of a heart attack. The show boasts a stunning array of scumbled- or cinched-surfaced achromes, monochromatic white pieces he made throughout his brief life, and in the space of just a few rooms, these get baroque, at least in their materials, going from canvas to cotton balls to rabbit fur.

But the highlight of the show is the 1961 “Socle du Monde,” a rusty iron plinth on which, conceptually speaking, the whole world is meant to rest. It’s the perfect meeting point of Manzonian humor and Gagosian hubris and, come to think of it, provides a handy little metaphor for this current recession thing, which has, so to speak, the whole world in its hands. —S.D.
Portrait of Piero Manzoni by Ugo Mulas, 1959

Photo © Hugo Mulas heirs, courtesy Gagosian Gallery