ART-PREVIEW:Marisa Merz-Geometrie Sconnesse Palpiti Geometrici
Born in Turin in 1926, Marisa Merz made her debut in the 1960s by exhibiting sculptures of aluminum foil, composed of several spiral, mobile and irregular elements. Linked to research on materials and essential planning, these early works – presented by Sperone in Turin as early as June 1967 – anticipate and prepare the artist’s participation in the Arte Povera movement.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Giancarlo e Danna Olgiati Archive
Covering more than 50 years of research the exhibition “Marisa Merz. Geometrie sconnesse palpiti geometrici” is composed of 45 works which embody the entire creative career of Marisa Merz: from the drawing on different supports to the sculpture in raw clay, from the weaving of copper wire and nylon to the objects transformed into wax, in an attempt to return all the expressive modalities proper to the artist. The exhibition project, curated by Beatrice Merz and developed in collaboration with the Merz Foundation, is part of a series of initiatives dedicated to artists present in the Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection and uses loans from important public and private collections – largely Swiss – as well as from the artist’s personal collection. The exhibition, which covers over fifty years of research, opens with some of the cornerstones of Marisa Merz’s production. Iconic works such as “Senza titolo” of 1975 document the highest results of the investigation on copper wire, an expressive medium that allows it to explore the boundaries between drawing and sculpture. Starting from the Seventies her interventions acquired a completely environmental character, as evidenced by the great installation in knitted copper wires, made in 1979 and ever since exposed. The exhibition continues with a wide selection of works, some unpublished, which include mixed drawings and techniques on different supports together with a refined group of its famous clay “heads”. All works that from the eighties trace the most recent path of Marisa Merz, highlighting a recurring theme in her production, the survey on the face or on the figure, identified as a reference point in the exhibition itinerary. In the introduction to the catalog, Beatrice Merz states: “The path of the exhibition is designed to allow individual works to maintain a close dialogue between them, thus creating a force field articulated by a succession of unknown and transfigured but profoundly real faces” ; faces or figures that “are executed through the superimposition of signs and materials, in an almost obsessive rhythm”. With some actions – the famous one with the rolled up covers placed on the Fregene shore in 1970, at the same time as the first solo show at the L’Attico gallery in Rome – Marisa Merz introduces in the language of contemporary sculpture techniques and traditional handicrafts or work prerogative feminine, giving full artistic dignity to the procedures and materials of everyday life and thus moving away both from the poetics of the primary, rational and self-referential structures of minimalism, and from the Arte Povera group, with respect to which it shows an eccentric sensitivity from now on. Combined with the temporal component already present in the knitting works, this leads her early to collect, combine and redefine her own previous works.
From the mid-seventies Merz’s interventions acquired a completely environmental character, first with the series of rooms that the artist set up in complementary spaces: the open and public one of the gallery or the underground and secret space of a cellar or of her own studio, with a continuous movement from the private to the public dimension, an uninterrupted metamorphosis of the graffiti tracks in sculptural forms and of the material physicality in painted colors. It will be in the eighties that the various voices in which her creativity has always been translated will find their perfect synthesis and complete maturity in the refined papers, in the heavy and impalpable heads and in the polymetric altarpieces: the personal shows from the galleries Bernier (Athens), Fischer (Düsseldorf), Tucci Russo (Turin), the invitations to the Biennale and Documenta, as well as the participation in important collective selections: after the 1980 Venice Biennale, it is in Paris for “Identité italienne. The art en Italie depuis” 1959, curated for the Center Pompidou by Germano Celant in 1981, then at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in Rome, for Avanguardia. Transavanguardia, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, in 1982, the year in which it is also at Documenta.
Info: Curator: Beatrice Merz, Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati Collection, Riva Caccia 1, Lugano, Duration: 22/9/19-12/1/20, Days & Hours: Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.collezioneolgiati.ch
