Marisa Merz at 100: Major Retrospective to Span Three Italian Museums

Italy’s Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s included just one woman: Marisa Merz, best known for quite some time as the wife of fellow artist Mario Merz. Slowly but surely, though, institutions around the world have been giving the late painter and sculptor her due. To celebrate the centenary of Merz’s birth, three institutions in and around her hometown of Turin are preparing to mount distinct exhibitions altogether comprising one show, titled “Marisa Merz – The Dance of the Hours.”

This forthcoming Merz retrospective will spread across the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) in Turin—Italy’s oldest modern art museum—as well as the city’s Fondazione Merz and the Castello di Rivoli, 30 minutes west. Press materials state that the extravaganza “is unlikely to be replicated in terms of comprehensiveness and depth.” Some never-before-seen works will appear, as will highlights from previous shows such as Merz’s critically acclaimed debut U.S. retrospective in 2017, “The Sky Is A Great Space“.

Little is known of Merz’s story prior to 1960—the year she married Mario and gave birth to their only child, Beatrice, who now serves as president and director of the discerning Fondazione Merz. The famous few details that have survived state that Merz’s father worked at a Fiat plant, she once modeled for neoclassical painter Felice Casorati, and she may have studied dance.

In 1966, Merz started handcrafting aluminum artworks now dubbed her “Living Sculptures.” These appeared in her first-ever solo show, at Turin’s Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery, the following year. Merz continued making art right up to her death in 2019, lending Arte Povera a crucial feminine perspective fully enamored of mystery, open ends, and motherhood. To these ends, she experimented with multitudinous materials like metal, fabric, wax, and paint.

Each exhibition under “The Dance of the Hours” will emphasize distinct elements of this ambitious practice.

Italian curators Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio are organizing the Castello di Rivoli’s contribution, which centers on Merz’s immersive E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare (1980), a standout artwork that featured in a special exhibition Italian modern art during the 39th Venice Biennale, at the invitation of famed Swiss curator Harald Szeeman. Manacorda and Vecellio have used this installation as a starting point to explore Merz’s interest in the metaphysical nature of space—while also highlighting the contemporary artists carrying her mantle today, like Swiss painter Miriam Cahn and Italian multimedia artist Micol Assaël.

At the Fondazione Merz, the artist’s daughter is teaming up with Sébastien Delot of the Musée Picasso Paris to present “a selection of works organized around the idea of process and transformation,” per press materials—elucidating Merz’s deliberate approach to balancing the material and immaterial while fostering each artwork’s becoming.

Meanwhile, at GAM, head of exhibitions and collections Chiara Bertola is partnering with Centre Pompidou-Metz director Chiara Parisi on another Merz show inspired by the quintessentially Arte Povera collision of art and life as encapsulated within her longtime home-studio-workshop.

All three exhibitions will share a single catalog, too, set to debut at a conference devoted to the artist. The date for that event has yet to be announced.