A piece of trademark 'shit art' by Italy's iconic conceptual artist Piero Manzoni has fetched a record price at auction here.
One of Manzoni's infamous 'Artist's Shit' cans was claimed by an unidentified European collector at Sotheby's on Tuesday night for 124,000 euros - more than double the reserve price of 60,000 euros.
The receptacle - one of 90 steel cans in which Manzoni sealed his excrement in 1961 - came from the collection of Belgian artist Jeff Vereheyen.
Manzoni's most notorious works are a provocation said to have been influenced by Surrealist king Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades.
They have achieved a status akin to Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans and Marcel Duchamp's fountains.
Made in 1961 and called Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit), the cans were an act of defiant mockery of the art world and art critics.
Each 30-gram can was numbered, signed, dated, labelled in four languages and offered for sale at the then price of its weight in gold.
The Tate Gallery now has one of the cans. Its online appreciation of the artist says: "Manzoni's decision to value his excrement at the price of gold made clear reference to the tradition of the artist as alchemist".
A fellow self-styled "rebel against the art mafia", Enrico Baj, famously called Manzoni "the last of the avant-garde".
The cans have become increasingly rare items due to internal combustion and metal corrosion.
So far, at least half of the cans have exploded.
Manzoni's cans were the climax of his journey from conventional art to outright provocation.
He began his career as a landscape painter and then experimented with an Expressionist style.
RADICAL EXPERIMENTS.
Strongly influenced by French artist Yves Klein whom he met in 1957, Manzoni subsequently began a series of radical experiments that would continue until his death in 1963.
His first Achromes - works with no colour - date from 1957.
They were monochromatic, textured white paintings built up of rough plaster that was scratched or marked.
Materials used for his later Achromes included kaolin (a fine white clay), felt, cotton, wool, rabbit fur, gravel and bread rolls.
Earlier this year one of Manzoni's Achromes sold for more than 2.5 million euros at Sotheby's in London.
The work, a small, colourless, kaolin-coated canvas made in 1959, was exhibited at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1998.
In addition to his paintings, Manzoni used his thumbprints on hard-boiled eggs, and signed his autograph on people including critic and writer Umberto Eco to create living sculptures.
Manzoni was also noted for his works with air and solar power.
In 1958 he created 'pneumatic sculptures', 45 blow-up-membranes.
The buyer could also have Manzoni's own breath inside the membrane.
He also tried to create a mechanical animal as a moving sculpture, using solar energy as a power source.
In 1960 he built a sphere that was held aloft on a jet of air.
The Artist's Shit series was one of Manzoni's last works.
He died in 1963 at the age 30 from cirrhosis of the liver.
Manzoni is enjoying a renewed vogue at the moment.
A Naples retrospective of his work from 1956 to his death is drawing huge crowds.
The show at the southern Italian city's Museum of Contemporary Art runs till September 24.
