Mario Merz

Milan, Italy, 1925 - 2003, Turin, Italy

BiographyMario Merz was born January 1, 1925, in Milan. He grew up in Turin and attended medical school for two years at the Università degli Studi di Torino. During World War II he joined the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà and was arrested in 1945 and confined to jail, where he drew incessantly on whatever material he could find. In 1950, he began to paint with oil on canvas. His first solo exhibition, held at Galleria La Bussola, Turin, in 1954, included paintings whose organic imagery Merz considered representative of ecological systems. By 1966, he began to pierce canvases and objects, such as bottles, umbrellas, and raincoats, with neon tubes, altering the materials by symbolically infusing them with energy.In 1967, he embarked on an association with several artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio, which became a loosely defined art movement labeled Arte Povera [more] by critic and curator Germano Celant. This movement was marked by an anti-elitist aesthetic, incorporating humble materials drawn from everyday life and the organic world in protest of the dehumanizing nature of industrialization and consumer capitalism.Iin 1968, Merz adopted one of his signature motifs, the igloo. It was constructed with a metal skeleton and covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, and bundles of branches, and often political or literary phrases in neon tubing. He participated in significant international exhibitions of Conceptual, Process, and Minimalist Art, such as Arte povera + azioni povera at the Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica, Amalfi, and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968; the latter exhibition traveled to Krefeld, Germany, and to London. In 1970, Merz began to utilize the Fibonacci formula of mathematical progression within his works, transmitting the concept visually through the use of the numerals and the figure of a spiral. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1972, he had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolic as a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction. Merz often responds to the specific environment of his exhibitions by incorporating materials indigenous to the area as well as adjusting the scale of the work to the site. His first solo European museum exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975, and his most recent retrospective was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1989. Merz works in Turin, where he resides with his wife, artist Marisa Merz.--from Guggenheim websiteFLASH ART NEWSLETTER (11/10/03)Mario Merz, one of the main protagonists of Italian and international postwar art, passed away Sunday morning at the age of 78. He was born in Milan in 1925 and lived in Turin. He interrupted his studies in medicine in order to dedicate himself completely to art. His first ventures into painting were characterized by a strong expressionist-informal component, which wasn't foreign to his friendships with Pinot Gallizio, Emilio Vedova, Asger Jorn, etc. In those years he also met his future wife Marisa, herself destined to an important artistic career, the only woman in the Arte Povera entourage. Towards the mid '70s he was one of the founders of the historical Arte Povera group named by Germano Celant. He began working with natural materials (stone, wood, earth, fruit...) combined with industrial materials (neon, glass, cement...) in organic installations that compose archetypical figures: for instance, the igloo and the spiral.In these same years he used the research on the Fibonacci sequence, a series of numbers derived from the sum of the previous two numbers, named after the mathematician who studied it. The Fibonacci sequence together with the igloo and the spiral -- trademarks of the Milanese artist -- arranged in huge spirals or straight lines, refer to the continuous cycle and structure of biological life.Already in 1967 he was included in the pages of Flash Art, in Germano Celant's famous manifesto on Arte Povera "Appunti per una guerriglia," which signalled the official birth of Arte Povera. In 1989, international recognition arrived with retrospectives at the Guggenheim in New York and at the MOCA in Los Angeles. Among the major group shows we remember "When attitudes become form" (Bern, 1969) and Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). Recently, his retrospectives were held in the Museu de Serralves, Porto in 1999 and in the Musée d'Art Modern et Contemporain, Nice in 2000. Last October, Mario Merz was the recipient of the important career prize, the Imperial Premium for the Arts in Tokyo.

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