Mario Merz (1925)
Italy


Biography :

"Born in 1925 in Milan (Italy) and died in 2003 in Turin (Italy)

The Italian painter and sculptor Mario Merz is one of the emblematic figures of the Arte Povera movement, the first exhibitions of which were organized by Germano Celant from 1967.
Mario Merz has spent his entire career in Turin. As a medical student, he joined the anti-fascist group Justice and Liberty during the Second World War. Arrested in 1945 and imprisoned, he began an intensive drawing activity. Mario Merz had his first personal exhibition in 1954 at the La Bussola Gallery in Turin, before leaving painting to experiment with other materials, such as neon tubes.
In 1987, the CAPC contemporary art museum in Bordeaux and the Center Georges Pompidou presented major exhibitions dedicated to Mario Merz. They were followed in 1989 by a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Numerous exhibitions were dedicated to him throughout the world during the 1990s and early 2000s. In October 2003, the Japanese Arts Association awarded Mario Merz the Praemium Imperiale, one of the most important artistic distinctions in the world.

All of Mario Merz's work is based on a principle of subversion of the usual tools of creation and on proposals for syntheses of different media. After a period very marked by painting and where the artist developed a conception of creation as a process, he turned towards sculpture in 1964. This new artistic approach builds on his previous practice of painting and picture: it is part of the wall instead of being hung there and the material and the surface are more important than the representation; it is also the image of his impetuous treatment of color: applying the latter directly from the tube to the surface to be painted, he goes so far as to produce a twenty centimeter thick spiral which therefore acquires the status of a unique experimental work . The artist never stops painting and he pierces his canvases with neon tubes, notably his representations of wild animals, and integrates canvases into his installations. The organic and the primitive, in both the plant and animal registers, are the two driving forces of Mario Merz’s art. These two perspectives do not, however, escape the industrial material – glass, aluminum, neon, worked stone, or, in another genre, piles of unsold newspapers – which the artist mixes with fruits and vegetables or with clay and bundles of wood, and even beeswax. The power of organic life is often expressed metaphorically in Merz's work by electricity circulating in a continuous flow of energy in neon lights.

The igloo remains one of the major symbols of Mario Merz's work, since the first one he created in 1968, the Igloo di Giap, in echo of the Vietnam War. Mario Merz's igloo takes all possible forms: constructed of clay, fabric, with cushions, glass or putty; presented alone (Igloo Fibonacci, 1972, metal structure and glass) or in pairs one inside the other (Dark Light, Light Dark, 1969), or even integrated into complex installations (Installation at MOCA [Installation at MOCA], 1989). The artist sees in the igloo a double cosmic dimension which responds to his desire to create a simple and foundational architecture. The spiral figure and the Fibonacci sequence are also among the tools that Merz uses to express the harmonious regularity as it occurs in natural or primitive organic structures. The table, finally, is used by Merz as the place capable of symbolizing the fulfillment of human needs in terms of activities of pleasure and interaction."

(Source, website, Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne)

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