Over Marisa Merz_Heads

_______Walking through______Merz's artwork

_______Intentions

__BLEND

Transforming space into an intimate landscape, navigating the numerous references, images, and expressions of Italian painting evoked by Marisa Merz –Antonello da Messina and Beato Angelico– to merge and form a performative work inhabited by primordial, organic, hybrid, and infantile femininities.

__ARISE

The cap_heads resurface as living matter and manifest in their essential beauty a human nature that survives the ongoing destruction.

Their fragile evidence presents itself as a form of resistance to the violence of wars.

__MULTIPLICATION

Seek the truth of the subject in the multiplication of its representations, of its bodily extensions. The multiple faces that Marisa Merz has modeled in wax, clay, or plaster, covered in pigments, gold leaf, and copper foil, or constantly drawn on every type of surface, possess a profound power, a hidden identity that can be refracted in the vibrant physiognomies of the performing subjects: a humanity tenderized despite the harshness and brutality of the present.

__TO LOOK

As Marisa Merz_wrote, it is 'with our eyes closed' that we see best, so we will try to explore her world by dematerializing our presence, eager to be together close and distant, silent and noisy, analytical and sentimental, in a tireless repetition of subject, form and gesture.

__TRANSlLITERATE

Biological transcripts of our existences in a warehouse_place, empty-full of harmless, abandoned, and functionless objects, where the tops_heads emerge, peaks of human hills destined by artistic genetics to express the complexity of existence and the enigma of death.

Bodies, memories, gestures to experience the meaning of life, a sense that implies the sensorium, the sentimental; in the work of performative transcription, the dilation of the sphere of the sensible, as evidence of contingent and precarious existence, is defined in an experience that appears as a time of anxious expectation of the unknown, of what is unknown, of that life that makes us tremble, as Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz writes in a short poem.

'No, live. We want to live forever. And we must for the honor of the world, as long as the world, time, and atmosphere are attached to our soles and ardent desire moves the proud and untamed spirit, from world to world from sphere to sphere always insatiably living. Yes, we want to live and tremble even if the earth beneath our feet, the earth that escapes us, and the air will break and the struggle will dominate the elements that want to dampen us, we who are gods, fight like rats. We mock their dead power like the lion mocks the mouse. And we continue to cry out until the impossible exhaustion of immense eternity.'

Maria Luisa Truccato, known as Marisa Merz (Turin 1926-2019) was an Italian artist, an exponent of the Arte Povera movement, where she lived and mainly practiced her artistic activity. In 1950 she met Mario Merz, whom she married and from whom she took her surname. She is the only female representative of Arte Povera. On an artistic level, he stood out in 1966 for an exhibition in which he used his apartment-atelier as an exhibition space, blurring the lines between intimate space and public place. Since 1967, the use of materials such as wool and copper, a conductor of energy, have prefigured the path of Arte Povera. With Mario Merz he reached the Arte Povera movement that same year.

In 1968, Marisa Merz switched to copper wire and nylon weaves. He then fuses small objects, such as postcards, into the white wax, evoking a protective cocoon. In 1969 he presented his plots and his small objects in space. He later dedicated numerous works to his daughter Bea, such as a swing or a plot that forms the girl's name.

In the 1970s, he produced a series of installations by mixing previously processed objects (copper wires, wax, wefts..) according to an arrangement that seemed random or variable according to the places of exhibition. It also produces heads made of wood or raw earth or even adorned with gold leaf or copper wire, as well as two sets of drawings, one in black pencil on canvas, the other in pastel and wax, often on cardboard. On the first, a very thin network of arabesques seems to trace the fragile contours of a face. The faces of the second are colorful and very expressive.

In the early 1980s, for reasons related to his artistic career, but which would prove temporary, he decided to give up personal exhibitions and participated only in major international artistic events. In 1992 he exhibited a small wax fountain at Documenta 9 in Kassel.

The solo exhibitions organized at the Centre Pompidou in 1994 and at the Stedelijk Museum in 1996 consolidated his international fame. The works of this period, presented on solid wooden or metal shelves, create a contrast for their fragility and discreet poetry.

Despite her age and the loss of her husband in 2003, Marisa Merz continues to develop a singular and emotional artistic production. In 2013, together with Maria Lassnig, he received the Golden Lion of the 55th Venice Biennale.

By introducing into contemporary art techniques that derive from so-called "feminine" crafts or activities (weaving, sewing), it gives them artistic dignity. Another constant in his work is the exploration of the interactions between inner space, identity, private life and social space.

In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum in New York dedicated the retrospective exhibition The Sky is a Great Space to her. He died at the age of 93 in Turin. His ashes rest in the Monumental Cemetery of Milan, in the Merz family shrine.