Background

Mario Merz was born on January 1, 1925, in Milan, Italy. His father was an architect.

Education

Mario grew up in Turin and attended medical school at the University of Turin for two years.

Career

During World War II, Mario joined the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà and was arrested in 1945 and confined to jail. It was at that time, that he started to create his drawings. Mario drew incessantly on whatever material he could find. Upon his release, the artist spent several months in Paris, working as a truck driver in Les Halles and pursuing political activities. At that time, he also visited the Louvre and learned about wider currents in the art world.

In 1950, Mario began to paint with oil on canvas. In 1954, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria La Bussola, in Turin, that included paintings, whose organic imagery Merz considered representative of ecological systems. By 1966, the artist had begun 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, Merz started to collaborate with several artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio, and their association became a loosely defined art movement, known as Arte Povera. This movement was marked by an antielitist aesthetic, incorporating materials, drawn from everyday life and the organic world in protest of the dehumanizing nature of industrialization and consumer capitalism.

It was in 1968, that Mario 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, bundles of branches and often political or literary phrases in neon tubing.

During his lifetime, the artist took part in many important international exhibitions of Conceptual, Process and Minimalist Art, that included "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 started to use the Fibonacci formula of mathematical progression in his works, transmitting the concept visually through the use of the numerals and the figure of a spiral. In 1972, the artist held his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, namely at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. By that time, he had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals and motorcycles to his iconography. Later, the artist also included the table, symbolizing a locus of the human need for fulfillment and interaction, into his work. Also, in 1972, Mario illustrated the Fibonacci progression with a series of photographs of a factory workers' lunchroom and a restaurant, progressively crowded with diners.

In the years 1972, 1977, 1983 and 1992, Mario Merz participated in the documenta 5, 6, 7 and 9. In 1975, His first solo European museum exhibition was held at Kunsthalle Basel. Later, in 1989, his major retrospective was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

In the late 1970's, Merz joined many artists of his generation in returning periodically to more conventional media. He also carved in marble, with which, in 2002, he made five statues, displayed from the windows of a building at the International Sculpture Biennale in Carrara.

It's worth noting, that in 1996, Mario collaborated with Jil Sander on a fashion show, including a wind tunnel of sheer white fabric, twisted and filled with blowing leaves. Along with six other collaborations between artists and fashion designers on the occasion of the first Biennale of Florence that same year, Merz and Sander were assigned an individual pavilion, designed by architect Arata Isosaki. Merz and Sander transformed their pavilion, which was open to the outside, into a wind tunnel, inspired by the form of a 10-foot diameter cylinder. One end of the tunnel was fitted with an oculus, through which the viewer could gaze into a vortex of blowing leaves and flowers through the length of a suspended fabric cone.

Achievements

• Mario Merz was a leading member of the Italian artistic movement, known as Arte Povera, and outstanding artist, who gained prominence for his arrangements of neon lights and found objects, such as broken glass, to create freestanding igloo-like structures. Besides his best-known works, that incorporated the Fibonacci sequence and the igloo, Merz painted a series of plain, unprimed canvases with figures of lizards and crocodiles as stylised and brightly coloured as emblems on a medieval banner, that brought him fame.
  
  During his lifetime, Merz received several awards, including the Praemium Imperiale, Ambrogino Gold Prize, Oskar Kokoschka Prize and Arnold Bode Prize. In 2015, Pace Gallery in New York City held the retrospective "Mario Merz" in his honor.
  
  Today, the artist's works are kept in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Works

More photos

• installation

  • Untitled

  • Fibonacci Igloo

  • Untitled

  • Alligator with Fibonacci Numbers to 377

  • Igloo Ticino

  • Installation of Fibonacci numbers at the Centre for International Light Art in Unna, Germany

  • Albero grande solitario

  • Untitled

  • Una lunghissima domenica

  • Impermeabile

  • Spiral Table

  • From Continent to Continent

  • Igloo

  • Igloo with Tree

  • Senza titolo (Triplo igloo)

• painting

  • Untitled

  • Il Saldatore

  • Untitled

  • Ezra Pound

Politics

During World War II, Mario was jailed for his collusion with the anti-Fascist group "Giustizia e Libertà".

Views

Through art, Mario counteracted what he saw as the dehumanizing forces of industrialization and consumerism. He eschewed fine art materials in favor of everyday and organic matter, like food, earth, found objects and neon tubing. As Merz was interested in the relationship between art and nature, much of his work addresses the organic growth of natural elements and the Fibonacci progression, a mathematical formula, developed by Leonardo Fibonacci in the Middle Ages. The igloo was also a central element in his oeuvre, through which the artist revealed the prehistoric and tribal features, hidden within the present time and space.

It's worth mentioning, that Merz was also intrigued by the powerful, as well as the small (a seed, that will generate a tree or the shape of a leaf) and applied both to his drawing.

Quotations: "My concern has always been with phenomena, that related to reality itself."

"Space is curved, the earth is curved, everything on earth is curved."

Personality

Merz wad fascinated by architecture - he admired the skyscraper-builders of New York City.

Connections

Merz was married to Marisa Merz, an artist. Their marriage produced one daughter - Beatrice.

child:

Beatrice Merz

Wife:

Marisa Merz

colleague:

Giovanni Anselmo

colleague:

Alighiero Boetti

colleague:

Luciano Fabro

colleague:

Jannis Kounellis

colleague:

Giulio Paolini

colleague:

Giuseppe Penone

colleague:

Michelangelo Pistoletto

colleague:

Gilberto Zorio

References

• Mario Merz: The Monograph This posthumous monograph is the most complete publication on the artist. It includes documentation of his entire artistic production, including paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, neon and Fibonacci series work, plus many previously unpublished materials.
  2005