In an effort to consider the status of the object within fine art, Am Nuden Da has made the decision to claim and exhibit Piero Manzoni’s seminal work Socle du Monde, Socle Magic No. 3- de Piero Manzoni - Homage a Galileo in Session_9_Object.

The work was made in 1961 in Herning, Denmark, where Manzoni had been invited to take part in a residency by a local industrialist. The work proclaims a somewhat absurd notion; that of the whole world as a work of art. As an homage to, and proposed extension of Manzoni’s thinking, Am Nuden Da will show the work in the gallery without physically moving it from its home in the Herning Kunstmuseum. The gesture provides a framework within which to show the work of five other artists who in different ways evaluate the nature of objects, materials and conceptual practice.

Vanessa Billy and Lydia Gifford are both making new works in response to the idea of the Manzoni piece and its inclusion in this show.

The works included by David Bellingham, Mauricio Guillén and Siôn Parkinson draw on different strategies as a means to engage with thoughts surrounding post (and pre) conceptual object making. Reductive and additive techniques are apparent, perhaps as a paradox, as is the readymade, appropriation and manipulation, and the role of language and its relationship to the materialistic as a tool for the exchange of ideas, and the negotiation of meaning.

By means of his dedication, Manzoni pulls into a parallax perspective the epistemological turn brought about by Galileo’s observations. This reference operates in a twofold manner, acknowledging the scientist’s conceptual and political position and re-capturing the natural, the worldly and the physical to art; a radically incisive gesture that echoes into contemporary approaches.