Piero Manzoni was born into an aristocratic family in Soncino near Milan in 1933. He studied briefly at the Accademia di Brera. After painting traditional landscapes during the early fifties. Manzoni experimented with new materials, such as oil, wax, enamel, gesso and glue. His first mature works were influenced by the Expressionism of the Informel artists Burri, Fontana and Jean Fautrier. By the beginning of 1956, he had begun to produce images by dipping such objects as keys, scissors, pliers and pincers in paint and impressing them on the canvas. These were followed by paintings built up with oil and tar. On 9 December 1956, Manzoni published the manifesto, Towards the Discovery of a Zone of Images in collaboration with Camillo Corvi-Mora. Ettore Sordini and Giuseppe Zecca. Manzoni claimed that the "world of art has its origin in an unconscious impulse that springs from a collective substratum of universal values common to all men, from which all men draw their gestures."

In the spring of 1957, he participated in a group show organized by Fontana at the Galleria Pater in Milan, and in June he joined the Gruppo Nucleare, which distributed his manifesto Towards an Organic Painting. In the autumn, he signed the Manifesto against Style which confirmed his support of the Gruppo Nucleare Internazionale. In response to the work of Fontana, Burri and Yves Klein (whose blue monochromes he had seen in the latter's first Italian exhibition, in January 1956), he invented the 'achrome', a painting built up of rough gesso that was then scratched or marked. The subsequent series of colourless achromes included canvases coated with kaolin (1958), felt, cotton and polystyrene (1960), wool and rabbit fur (1961), bread rolls and stones (1962).

In January 1958, he had an exhibition with Enrico Baj and Fontana at the Galleria Bergamo but, by the beginning of 1959, he had left the Gruppo Nucleare and was working more independently. He met Agostino Bonalumi, Vencenzo Agnetti and Enrico Castellani and published the review Azimuth, with the latter. Developing an increasingly conceptual approach, Manzoni produced his first Lines in 1959. These were made by drawing a line with an ink-soaked pad on a roll of white paper. The various lengths of paper were rolled and each placed in a container which specified its length and date of execution. The longest line produced was that of Herning Park, Denmark (1960): a measured 7,200 metres. Henk Peeters introduced him to the Zero group during a visit to The Hague. In April 1959, Manzoni was in Rome to launch his book in gesso entitled Piero Manzoni Parla. On his return to Milan he created forty-five Bodies of Air, instantly inflatable sculptures which he continued to make until 1961. Those containing his won breath were known as Artist's Breath.

He opened the Azimuth gallery with Castellani in December 1959; in July of the following year, he organized an exhibition entitled "Consumazione dell'arte attraverso la sua divorazione' (Consuming Art by Devouring It), during which he handed out hard-boiled eggs signed with his thumb print and invited the public to eat them. Like much of Manzoni's work, the eggs parodied the mass-produced items of our consumer society and, in a Neo-Dada vein, satirized the reverence afforded to fine art and the artist. Late in 1960, he signed the manifesto Against Nothing with Castellani, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. The following year he produced his first Magic Base for living sculptures: while standing on the base, anyone would become a work of art. At the Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome, he signed his first living sculptures and issued them with certificates of authenticity. He also produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit which he considered to be the ultimate statement on the unity of art and life. In 1961, he also went to Paris to see the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition '40° au-dessous de Dada", where he met and befriended Arman, Jean Tinguely and Klein.

In Manzoni's words, "being is all that counts." He thus held that art comprised everything in the world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. He glorified this notion in Base of the World 1961), an upside down 'magic base', dedicated to Galileo, which held up the entire world. A precocious exponent of Conceptual Art, Manzoni was a tireless promoter of exhibitions and manifestos and an important link between the Italian and other European avant-gardes. He died in 1963, leaving an artistic legacy that was an inspiration to the younger generation, especially to the Arte Povera