Mario Merz
Encyclopedia
Mario Merz was an Italian
artist
, and husband of Marisa Merz
.
, Merz started drawing during World War II
, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà
antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from the paper. He explored the relationship between nature and the subject, until he had his first exhibitions in the intellectually incendiary context of Turin in the 1950s, a cultural climate fed by such writers as Cesare Pavese
, Elio Vittorini
, and Ezra Pound
.
He met Marisa Merz
during his studies in Turin
in the 1950s. They were associated with the development of Arte Povera
, and they were both influenced by each other's works.
He died at Turin
in 2003.
pierced everyday objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle or his own raincoat. Without ever using ready-made objects as "things" (at least to the extent that the Nouveau Realistes in France did), Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context.
Many of his installations were accented with words or numbers in neon. The numbers counted off the Fibonacci progression, the mathematical formula (named for the Italian monk and mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci who discovered it) for growth patterns found in many forms of life, including leaves, snail shells, pine cones and reptile skins. The pattern is identifiable as a sequence of numbers in which any given number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc., ad infinitum. From 1969 Merz employed the Fibonacci sequence in performances and installations throughout his career to represent the universal principles of creation and growth: climbing up the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971) or the spire of a Turin landmark (1984), or perched in neon on a stack of newspapers among the old masters of Naples' Capodimonte Gallery (1987). In 1972 he illustrated the Fibonacci progression with a series of photographs of a factory workers' lunchroom and a restaurant progressively crowded with diners. His 1973 show at the John Weber Gallery in New York expressed the Fibonacci in a series of low modular tables. In 1990 the sequence determined the form of a spiral assembled from sticks, iron and paper across 24 meters of a hall in Prato, near Florence.
Merz became fascinated by architecture: he admired the skyscraper-builders of New York City
; his father was an architect; and his art thereby conveys a sensitivity for the unity of space and the human residing therein. He made big spaces feel human, intimate and natural. He was intrigued by the powerful (Wagner, D’annunzio) as well as the small (a seed that will generate a tree or the shape of a leaf) and applied both to his drawing.
In the 1960s, Merz’s work with energy, light and matter placed him in the movement that Germano Celant
named Arte Povera
, which, together with Futurism
, was one of the most influential movements of Italian art in the 20th century. In 1968 Merz began to work on his famous igloo
s and continued throughout his life, revealing the prehistoric and tribal features hidden within the present time and space. He saw the mobility of this typical shelter for nomadic wandering as an ideal metaphor for the space of the artist. The neon words on his igloos are hallmark Italian phraseology: like "rock ‘n’ roll," they have the power of being the more than catch phrases or slogans, but the voice of his time in history. His first of the dome-shaped structures, "Giap's Igloo," in 1968 was decorated with a saying by General Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam: If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground. If he scatters, he loses force.
By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center
, Minneapolis, in 1972, Merz had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolizing a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction.
From the late 1970s to the end of his career, Merz joined many artists of his generation in returning periodically to more conventional media. He even, occasionally, carved in marble, with which in 2002 he made five statues displayed from the windows of a building at the International Sculpture Biennale in Carrara. Merz said: "Space is curved, the earth is curved, everything on earth is curved" and subsequently produced large curvilinear installations like the one at the Guggenheim
in New York. These last works are formally transcendent and unusually light. His site-specific works in archaeological sites redeem spaces from touristy tedium with a single neon line, which serves as source of aesthetic inspiration. He had the wild, immediate perceptiveness of a child. His works encapsulate this nature together with an uncanny universality and versatility.
in 1975. He has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1975) ;
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
, New York (1989); Moderna Museet
, Stockholm (1983). In the years 1972, 1977, 1983 and 1992 Mario Merz participated in the documenta
5, 6, 7 and 9. In 1989, his work "Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna" was installed at the Deichtorhallen
.
Merz was awarded the Ambrogino Gold Prize, Milan; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel; and the Praemium Imperiale
for sculpture (2003). He was the subject of an atmospheric film, Mario Merz (2002), shot during the summer of 2002 in San Gimignano
by the British artist Tacita Dean
. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, and husband of Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz is an Italian sculptor, widow of artist Mario Merz. She now lives in Milan.-Life:Marisa Merz was born in Turin, Italy in 1931. In the 1950s she met Mario Merz who was studying there, and they later got married...
.
Life
Born in MilanMilan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, Merz started drawing during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà
Giustizia e Libertà
Giustizia e Libertà was an Italian anti-fascist organization, active from 1929 to 1945.- Italian anti-fascist organization :The anti-fascist organization Giustizia e Libertà was founded in Paris in 1929 by the Italian refugees Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lussu, Alberto Tarchiani, and Ernesto Rossi...
antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from the paper. He explored the relationship between nature and the subject, until he had his first exhibitions in the intellectually incendiary context of Turin in the 1950s, a cultural climate fed by such writers as Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator; he is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.- Early life and education :...
, Elio Vittorini
Elio Vittorini
Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S...
, and Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
.
He met Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz is an Italian sculptor, widow of artist Mario Merz. She now lives in Milan.-Life:Marisa Merz was born in Turin, Italy in 1931. In the 1950s she met Mario Merz who was studying there, and they later got married...
during his studies in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
in the 1950s. They were associated with the development of Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
, and they were both influenced by each other's works.
He died at Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
in 2003.
Work
Merz discarded abstract expressionism’s subjectivity in favor of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas. From the mid-1960s, his paintings echoed his desire to explore the transmission of energy from the organic to the inorganic, a curiosity that lead him to create works in which neon lightsNeon lighting
Neon lighting is created by brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Georges Claude, a French engineer and inventor, presented neon tube lighting in essentially its modern form at the Paris Motor Show from December 3–18, 1910...
pierced everyday objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle or his own raincoat. Without ever using ready-made objects as "things" (at least to the extent that the Nouveau Realistes in France did), Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context.
Many of his installations were accented with words or numbers in neon. The numbers counted off the Fibonacci progression, the mathematical formula (named for the Italian monk and mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci who discovered it) for growth patterns found in many forms of life, including leaves, snail shells, pine cones and reptile skins. The pattern is identifiable as a sequence of numbers in which any given number is the sum of the two numbers that precede it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc., ad infinitum. From 1969 Merz employed the Fibonacci sequence in performances and installations throughout his career to represent the universal principles of creation and growth: climbing up the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971) or the spire of a Turin landmark (1984), or perched in neon on a stack of newspapers among the old masters of Naples' Capodimonte Gallery (1987). In 1972 he illustrated the Fibonacci progression with a series of photographs of a factory workers' lunchroom and a restaurant progressively crowded with diners. His 1973 show at the John Weber Gallery in New York expressed the Fibonacci in a series of low modular tables. In 1990 the sequence determined the form of a spiral assembled from sticks, iron and paper across 24 meters of a hall in Prato, near Florence.
Merz became fascinated by architecture: he admired the skyscraper-builders of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
; his father was an architect; and his art thereby conveys a sensitivity for the unity of space and the human residing therein. He made big spaces feel human, intimate and natural. He was intrigued by the powerful (Wagner, D’annunzio) as well as the small (a seed that will generate a tree or the shape of a leaf) and applied both to his drawing.
In the 1960s, Merz’s work with energy, light and matter placed him in the movement that Germano Celant
Germano Celant
Germano Celant is an Italian art historian, critic and curator, mostly renewed for being one of the founding members of the "Arte Povera" movement in 1967....
named Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
, which, together with Futurism
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
, was one of the most influential movements of Italian art in the 20th century. In 1968 Merz began to work on his famous igloo
Igloo
An igloo or snowhouse is a type of shelter built of snow, originally built by the Inuit....
s and continued throughout his life, revealing the prehistoric and tribal features hidden within the present time and space. He saw the mobility of this typical shelter for nomadic wandering as an ideal metaphor for the space of the artist. The neon words on his igloos are hallmark Italian phraseology: like "rock ‘n’ roll," they have the power of being the more than catch phrases or slogans, but the voice of his time in history. His first of the dome-shaped structures, "Giap's Igloo," in 1968 was decorated with a saying by General Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam: If the enemy masses his forces, he loses ground. If he scatters, he loses force.
By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...
, Minneapolis, in 1972, Merz had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolizing a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction.
From the late 1970s to the end of his career, Merz joined many artists of his generation in returning periodically to more conventional media. He even, occasionally, carved in marble, with which in 2002 he made five statues displayed from the windows of a building at the International Sculpture Biennale in Carrara. Merz said: "Space is curved, the earth is curved, everything on earth is curved" and subsequently produced large curvilinear installations like the one at the Guggenheim
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
in New York. These last works are formally transcendent and unusually light. His site-specific works in archaeological sites redeem spaces from touristy tedium with a single neon line, which serves as source of aesthetic inspiration. He had the wild, immediate perceptiveness of a child. His works encapsulate this nature together with an uncanny universality and versatility.
Recognition
Merz had his first one-man exhibition, in 1954, at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin; his first solo European museum exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle BaselKunsthalle Basel
Since opening in 1872, Kunsthalle Basel has examined various positions concerning contemporary art. This renowned exhibition space in the Swiss city of Basel has a very long tradition of supporting avant-garde artists and expanding the accepted boundaries of contemporary art. Contemporary art...
in 1975. He has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1975) ;
Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, New York (1989); Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet
Moderna museet, the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, that was first opened in 1958. Its first manager was Pontus Hultén...
, Stockholm (1983). In the years 1972, 1977, 1983 and 1992 Mario Merz participated in the documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
5, 6, 7 and 9. In 1989, his work "Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna" was installed at the Deichtorhallen
Deichtorhallen
Deichtorhallen, in Hamburg, is one of Europe's largest art centers for contemporary art and photography. The two historical buildings dating from 1911-13 are iconic in style, with their open steel-and-glass structures. It's architecture creates a backdrop for spectacular major international...
.
Merz was awarded the Ambrogino Gold Prize, Milan; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel; and the Praemium Imperiale
Praemium Imperiale
The Praemium Imperiale is an arts prize awarded since 1989 by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film...
for sculpture (2003). He was the subject of an atmospheric film, Mario Merz (2002), shot during the summer of 2002 in San Gimignano
San Gimignano
San Gimignano is a small walled medieval hill town in the province of Siena, Tuscany, north-central Italy. It is mainly famous for its medieval architecture, especially its towers, which may be seen from several kilometres outside the town....
by the British artist Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean
Tacita Dean is an English visual artist who works primarily in film. She is one of the Young British Artists, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998.-Life and work:...
. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.
Contributions
- Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International http://blog.cmoa.org/CI08/2008/02/mario-merz.php