ART-TRIBUTE:Marisa Merz-The Sky is a Great Space
Marisa Merz has a unique place in the history of Contemporary art. With her appearance of absence, her visionary distraction, her fragile physicality and sharp gaze. Mariza Merz has always defied the logic and economics of the art world. She lives according to her own rules, rigid and unbreakable. Her work is always a confident discourse about art, history and the history of art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Archive
The exhibition “The Sky Is a Great Space” is the first major retrospective of works by Marisa Merz, encompassing 50 years of work, from her early experiments with nontraditional art materials and processes to mid-career installations that balance intimacy with impressive scale to the enigmatic portrait heads she created after 1975. As Connie Butler, one of the curators of the exhibitions: “The work of Marisa Merz exists in the intersection of art and life that has become so central to contemporary practice. Her challenging and evocative body of work is deeply personal, as much a response to her own experience as to art history and the milieu of contemporary Turin and postwar Italy”. As the only female protagonist of Arte Povera and one of the few Italian women at the time to present her work in major international venues, Marisa Merz showed a practice that was inflected by gender and cultural differences. Merz’s challenging and evocative body of work was deeply personal and decidedly anticareerist. Its consequence and scope also exceeded its occasionally diminutive scale. Merz’s earliest work, begun around 1965 in the house she shared with husband Mario Merz, is a tangle of molded aluminum hung from the ceiling that combined sharp, rough metal edges with soft, biomorphic contours, expanding the existing conception of a ‘mobile’ into a colossus. In the late ‘60s, she went on to create a series of powerful works from non-traditional materials that referenced both her family life and the broader Italian tradition of polymaterialism: sculptures of rolled up blankets bound with nylon thread that were occasionally used as props in performances by her husband, a plywood swing for her daughter that joins sculptural rigor with youthful play and a series of knitted nylon wire sculptures, including the iconic booties that the artist sometimes wore herself. In the 1970s Merz’s trademark installations of humble materials, delicate copper wire, bowls of salt, knitting needles–grew more and more complex. After 1975, the artist began sculpting a series of small heads, often roughly modelled in clay and unfired. These were debuted in the 1980s and would become emblematic of the artist and her late work. In the last two decades of her career, Merz’s work has grown even larger and more complex. Individual works continue to be integrated into multimedia installations of varying size and intricacy. Her painting and graphic work has also grown ever more elaborate, combining collage elements and diverse materials including tape, mirrors, binder clips, bottle caps, and metallic pigments. Large, visually gorgeous, yet surprisingly unsentimental, paintings of winged angels constitute another important group of very recent works.
Info: Curators: Connie Butlerand Ian Alteveer, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Rua Dom João de Castro 210, Porto, Duration 20/1-22/4/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.serralves.pt
