Marisa Merz (1926)
Italy
Biography :
"Italian sculptor and multimedia artist.
Before devoting herself fully to the graphic arts, Marisa Merz pursued architectural studies, during which she met her husband, Mario Merz, a major artist on the Italian scene of the second half of the 20th century. She began exhibiting in 1967 in Turin, city of Fiat and embryonic location of the protest movement Arte povera ("poor art") which, from the end of the 1960s, brought together a group of Italian artists using materials as art objects. “poor”, often taken from everyday life. In 1968, she participated with her husband, Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, in the action Arte povera + Azioni povere ("poor art + poor actions") and abandoned, on the beach of Amalfi, her wire works of copper or braided nylon in the shape of small children's shoes (Scarpette di Bea) or with the image of his daughter, Béatrice. From the beginning, in her figurative and abstract works, she chose metallic materials, emblematic of the artists of the group but also of the New York supporters of Minimal Art, a movement from which she however radically differentiates herself by the work she does on the material. and the new forms that she creates: she finely assembles strips of aluminum, spins inextricable webs of nylon and copper, subjects these industrial materials to a patient sewing task, secularly attributed to women, which makes them light , aerial, inconsistent like spider webs (Untitled, 1979), organic in their tubular or triangular shapes, in their slightly irregular growths that they always assume. It is the attention and the value she gives to the intrinsic properties of materials, their rigidity or their flexibility, their malleability, their color above all, which create the artist's universe, poetic, spare, driven by an obvious research of beauty.
Since the 1970s, she has been working with wax and paraffin, and giving shape to these essentially formless materials. Very present, copper, both a warm color and material, has almost become the artist's antiphon (leitmotif). These games of shapes and materials find their full expression in his installations which bring together, like a dream, objects that are a priori scattered and dissimilar: cups and threads, glasses, tables, rose petals, leaves. or a bathtub where steel plant growths grow associated with an isolated white paraffin block. His installations, very often “untitled”, raise the question of the unity of the work of art. They do not offer easy reading but rather conjure (solicit) the imagination of the viewer, invited into an intimate and all the more lyrical world as the artist gets into the habit, from 1979, of inserting poems by his hand. The imagination is particularly stimulated by a set of sensory suggestions. For example, the work Untitled from 1997 presents a white wax fountain violin placed in a dark lead base, a receptacle for the sound effects of the water jets released by the violin. From the 1980s, the figure, drawn and modeled, held a considerable place in his installations. She executed an abundant series of portraits on canvas or paper, in pencil or pastel, small or very large. She also undertook a series of heads modeled in plaster or earth, and experimented with a whole series of forms, until completely abolishing the facial features by pouring a greenish wax onto the heads which distantly evoked the heads of the sculptor Medardo Rosso. Often colored (Untitled, polychrome clay, 1982), sometimes covered with a thin net of copper or woven gold, its modeled heads, placed on base memories (stools, tripods, chairs), as are its heads painted and many of his objects, complicate the scenographies of his installations. Despite the artist's discretion, there are many and prestigious institutions that have paid tribute to him: the Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadrennial, the Center Pompidou."
(Source, website, Aware women artists)