Jef Verheyen

The Belgian ZERO artist Jef Verheyen (1932-1984) became known as the painter of light streams and colour spectra. He experimented not only with light, but also with movement and the invisible as means to evoke natural mechanisms and to reveal universal interrelationships between human beings and the surrounding world. He used geometric principles – his passion for geometry was born out of his interest in mathematics and (Greek) philosophy – as the basis for harmony. Verheyen never gave up on traditional media and materials such as the canvas, paint, and brushes to search for the essence of our nature.

Piero Manzoni

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Linea, 1959

Private Collection

Drawing , 333 x 234 mm

ink, paper

Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) is one of the great legends of post-WWII art, not in the least owing to his mastery of the weapon of provocation. The thoroughly unaesthetic oeuvre – from the *Achromes* (white canvases folded and saturated with porcelain clay) to the tinned artist’s excrement and the *Linea*, short or lengthy lines on paper – does away with the annoying and boring mystic discourse which so preoccupied art at that time. He is that happy hooligan who at the start of 1962 answers to G58 that he will gladly take part in their *Anti-peinture* exhibition: ‘For this occasion I would like to make something “moving”, more specifically a “moving shit”, but I don’t know if I still have time enough to finalize it.’ Fortunately he pulled it off, and Manzoni was represented in *Anti-peinture* with *peinture achrome*, *merda d’artista* and *ligne infinie*.

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