Marisa Merz: Listen to the Space

The earliest known works by the Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019) are her Living Sculptures, which she made in 1966. They consist of tangles of shiny tubes, crafted from sheets of aluminium foil, which Merz hung from the ceiling of her apartment in Turin; ‘the house was completely invaded’, the film-maker Tonino De Bernardi recalled.¹ Later, Merz installed the sculptures in a nightclub and at Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, both also in Turin, where the artist was born and resided for most of her life. In photographs, the works resemble the mantle and tentacles of some strange billowing sea creature. It is immediately evident why she classified them as ‘living’.

Indeed, for Merz, all art was alive: ever-changing and, ultimately, fleeting. This philosophy is reflected in some of the materials she used – unfired clay, fountains of gushing water and melting wax – as well as the way in which she continually revisited and altered her pieces over time. Each installation of a work of art was a new chapter in its life story. Merz, therefore, often left her pieces – ranging from sculpture to painting, drawing and ‘actions’ – untitled and even undated. The critic and curator Germano Celant did not include Merz in his 1967 manifesto ‘Arte Povera: Notes on a guerrilla war’ – although he did reference her husband Mario Merz (1925–2003) – but he should have. Her practice clearly exemplifies his ideal of ‘a poor art, committed to contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present’.²

How, then, to organise an exhibition in her absence? This was the challenge facing the curatorial team of Marisa Merz: Listen to the Space, the first institutional solo show of the artist’s work since her death, which is staged at the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Villeneuve-d’Ascq (LaM). The curators, Sébastien Delot, Grégoire Prangé and Andrea Viliani, have achieved a judicious compromise: somewhere between a homage and a historical survey, informed by consultation with the artist’s collaborators and the Fondazione Merz, Turin. Following the artist’s known preferences, the shutters in the galleries have been opened so that the sky is visible, and the extensive selection of works is displayed non-chronologically and without captions. To help orientate the visitor, the six galleries are each allocated a subtle theme, which is conveyed by an esoteric title or a quotation, such as ‘As much or as little’, ‘The thread of language’ and ‘The head is rounded by a smile’. ‘Interpreting the archive’ contains biographical material and documentation of Merz’s most ephemeral works, including the Living Sculptures and a film in which she counts out every single pea in a can.

It would have been uncharacteristic for Merz to leave strict instructions for the installation of her works. Display formats, therefore, are based on the artist’s previous choices and her more general approach. In the middle of the first gallery, an assortment of her ‘testine’ (‘little heads’) – crudely fashioned from raw clay and bronze – perch atop unvarnished wooden plinths from her studio FIG.1. Two more are installed in the corner of the room, placed upon a sheet of paraffin wax on the floor. Throughout the exhibition, paintings and drawings are displayed with a similarly provisional methodology: pinned or clipped to the wall or propped up against it, balancing on bricks or trestles FIG.2. In one gallery, a group of twenty-seven framed drawings on canvas of abstracted faces, some of which are adorned with a collaged coin or leaf, spill over from one wall onto the next. The corner of the room serves as a kind of punctuation mark – a comma or a dash. This is how Merz preferred to show her work, placing it in dialogue with the architecture of a space.

Merz tended not to explain her art and rarely granted interviews. One can only guess at the meaning of her long-standing motifs – such as abstracted heads and flowing fountains – which she rendered in all manner of materials, from copper wire FIG.3 to rose petals, and at various scales. Equally enigmatic are the colours that recur across her œuvre: black, ultramarine blue and shimmering gold. When Merz did write about her work, it was often in the form of beautifully gnomic poems, one of which lends this exhibition its title. It is the quiet mystery of Merz’s practice that makes it so enchanting – a quality that is thoughtfully preserved in the curators’ decision to avoid didacticism. The accompanying exhibition booklet does offer some hints, such as the artist’s interest in ‘dialoguing with the great Renaissance masters’, particularly when drawing Madonnas, angels and other celestial beings. However, the arrangement of works in the space invites the viewer to simply observe connections between and within them: how the pencil rubbings on canvas, for example, expose the warp and weft of their support, mirroring the construction of the three-dimensional weavings, such as Scarpetta (1968), one in a series of nylon slippers FIG.4 that Merz scaled to her feet and would sometimes wear.

In identifying these interrelations, it becomes apparent why Merz understood her art more as a continuously evolving project than as a sequence of individual accomplishments. That is not to say that she was unwilling to try out different things. Among the surprises in the exhibition is a remarkably vivid portrait of her daughter, Beatrice FIG.5, executed in mixed media on rice paper. The girl’s face floats above an abstracted body set against a copper background. Her gaze is serious and thoughtful: nothing like the schematic, almost alien-like heads for which Merz is better known. But while the mode of expression is new, the subject-matter is not. One of Merz’s early works – the only one shown at the first official Arte Povera exhibition organised by Celant in 1968 – is a nylon weaving punctured with knitting needles that spells out her daughter’s nickname: BEA FIG.6.

BEA is shown in the final gallery, which is also the only space that the curators have modified for the exhibition; Merz preferred to leave things as they were. A free-standing wall has been installed towards one end of the room, displaying an assortment of mixed-media paintings and drawings: mostly heads, again, some on tiny bits of canvas and others on larger sheets of paper FIG.7. This is not a discrete series or group. In fact, the three largest works have never been shown before now FIG.8. However, the seemingly haphazard way that the pieces are arranged on the wall is clearly inspired by Merz’s own installations. It particularly recalls the artist’s constellations of woven copper squares, which she attached to walls with drawing pins, resembling musical notation. Reconfigured here, the individual paintings and drawings are transformed into something new: a kind of collage, perhaps. Although it can never be exactly what Merz would have done, this wall serves as a fitting tribute: a way to keep her work alive.