Mario Merz
Mario Merz | |
---|---|
Milan, Italy | |
Nationality | Italian |
Known for | Sculpture and painting |
Movement | Arte Povera |
Mario Merz (1 January 1925 – 9 November 2003) was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.
Life
Born in Milan, 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.
Work
This section possibly contains original research. (February 2015) |
Merz discarded abstract expressionism's subjectivity in favour 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 led him to create works in which neon lights 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.
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
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 fulfilment and interaction.[5]
From the late 1970s to the end of his career, Merz joined many artists of his generation in returning periodically to more conventional media. In Le Foglie (The Leaves) (1983–84), measuring over 26 feet across, gold leaf squares are scattered around two large asymmetrical leaf-like forms.[6] 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. This retrospective was the artist's first major museum show in the United States. 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 a 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 1996, Merz collaborated with Jil Sander on a fashion show, including a wind tunnel of sheer white fabric twisted and filled with blowing leaves.[7] Along with six other collaborations between artists and fashion designers on the occasion of the first Biennale of Florence that same year, Merz and Sander were assigned an individual pavilion designed by architect Arata Isozaki. Merz and Sander transformed their pavilion, which was open to the outside, into a wind tunnel inspired by the form of a 10-foot diameter cylinder. One end of the tunnel was fitted with an oculus through which the viewer could gaze into a vortex of blowing leaves and flowers through the length of a suspended fabric cone.[8]
Exhibitions
Merz had his first one-man exhibition, in 1954, at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin;
Recognition
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.
Collections
- Centre for International Light Art (CILA), Unna, Germany
- Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen, Switzerland
Contributions
- Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International Mario Merz - Signals
Legacy
The Fondazione Merz was founded in 2005 in Turin, Italy, by Mario Merz's daughter Beatrice.[9] The Mario Merz Prize was launched in 2015.[10] In 2022, the Fondazione Merz opened an outpost in Palermo.[11]
References
- ^ "Mario Merz". www.telegraph.co.uk.
- ^ a b Roberta Smith (November 13, 2003), Mario Merz, 78, an Italian Installation Artist New York Times.
- ^ a b Mario Merz, September 18, 2008 - January 6, 2009 Archived July 25, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Gladstone Gallery, New York.
- ^ a b Christopher Masters (November 13, 2003), Obituary: Mario Merz The Guardian.
- ^ Biography: Mario Merz Guggenheim Collection.
- ^ Mario Merz: Major Works from the 1980s, 1 November - 22 December 2012 Archived 30 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine Sperone Westwater, New York.
- New York Times.
- art – Das Kunstmagazin.
- ^ "The Foundation Dedicated to Mario and Marisa Merz Had Big Plans to Celebrate Its Anniversary in Italy. Then the Pandemic Hit". artnet News. 29 April 2020. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
- ^ "Shortlisted Artists 2017 Mario Merz Prize". artnet News. 11 June 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2020.
- ^ Kabir Jhala (11 January 2022), How the Merz Foundation plans to turn an industrial park in Palermo into a thriving contemporary art hub within three years The Art Newspaper.
Literature
- Christel Sauer: Mario Merz: Isola della Frutta, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-905777-02-4
- Christel Sauer: Mario Merz: Architettura fondata dal tempo, architettura sfondata dal tempo, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-905777-03-1
- Christel Sauer: Mario Merz: Le braccia lunghe della preistoria, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-905777-04-8
- Christel Sauer: Mario Merz: Casa sospesa, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-905777-05-5
- Meret Arnold: Mario Merz: My home's wind, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2011, ISBN 978-3-905777-07-9
- Christel Sauer: Mario Merz: Senza titolo, Raussmüller Collection, Basel 2011, ISBN 978-3-905777-08-6