Marisa Merz was born in 1926 in Turin, where her teenage years saw her familiarising herself with a cultural environment characterised by experimentation, until the first presentation of her Living Sculptures – works created out of aluminium foil – in 1967, held in her own house and at the Gian Enzo Sperone gallery in the same city. Often presented as the only woman in the Arte Povera group1, Marisa Merz appropriated a number of its codes and concerns – its interest in raw materials, sculpture’s relationship with space and art’s relationship with life – without actually becoming a fully fledged member. Developing a substantially autonomous position, she spent over fifty years producing a resolutely open body of work.

In her studio, Marisa Merz transformed space and time into a great collage, navigating between numerous references, images and expressions of art history along with a wide variety of everyday objects and materials from aluminium to clay, copper to nylon, and wax to fabric. A radically personal expressive repertoire in which high and popular culture, art materials and everyday objects mingle with each other to form a strangely powerful body of work as intimate as it is extraordinary.

Marisa Merz worked in series, creating ephemeral works undergoing continuous change and returning repeatedly to the same motifs, materials and techniques in order to get as close as possible to their essence. She explored her subjects through constant subtle variations from one work to the next, playing on scales, shapes, materials, colours and surface effects. As a result, the many faces that she modelled in wax, clay and plaster, covered with pigments, gold leaf or copper wire, and drew tirelessly on all types of mediums – from wooden boards to sheets of paper – have the same dynamic uncertainty and power of attraction as those by such artists as Medardo Rosso and Amedeo Modigliani. Well aware that painting is a language with a memory, she was able to trace its history, stretching from Byzantine icons to the most radical of religious paintings, by Fra Angelico and Antonello da Messina, while nonetheless tracing a history that belonged to her alone.

Although, for Marisa Merz, “l’occhio guida la mano” [the eye guides the hand], she also wrote, “Ad occhi chiusi gli occhi sono straordinariamente aperti” [When the eyes are closed, they are extraordinarily open]. Hence, her body of work’s subtle power is expressed in this vision nourished by the inner self, in her relationship with the reflexive dimension of solitary work in the studio, with silence, with the poetry that reveals itself in the tiniest details, her quest for the overwhelming fragility of art, which is also that of life.

There are no works by Marisa Merz in France’s public collections. The LaM is therefore providing almost all its visitors with fresh discoveries by presenting some hundred works, a number of which will be on display to the public for the very first time. The exhibition, which is based on in-depth work carried out in the archives, is also organised as an investigation that not only examines her almost totally elusive artistic practice, but also the choices and methods required to develop the possibility of a testimony, and a retrospective.

A catalogue is set to be co-published with Éditions Fonds Mercator, comprising previously unpublished essays by Sébastien Delot, Marianna Vecellio and Andrea Viliani, republished texts by the artist, a chronology drawn up by Grégoire Prangé and numerous archival documents.

Curatorship

Sébastien Delot, Director of Collections and Mediation, National Picasso Museum-Paris.
Grégoire Prangé, Exhibition curator, in charge of curatorial coordination, LaM.
Andrea Viliani, Director of the Museo della Civiltà, Rome.