{"id":4509,"date":"2018-01-27T17:11:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-27T16:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marottaeditori.com\/?p=4509"},"modified":"2018-02-07T16:23:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T15:23:32","slug":"mario-merz-engagement-light-ligloo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/mario-merz-engagement-light-ligloo\/","title":{"rendered":"Mario Merz: engagement, light and..l’igloo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The work of Mario Merz<\/strong> has gone through the twentieth century. Exponent of Poor Art<\/strong>, in his research there are some constant elements: from neon light to igloos, from Fibonacci series to piles of newspapers. Without ever neglecting civil commitment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong>Mario Merz was born in Milan in 1925 from a family of Swiss origin. He grew up in Turin, where he attended the Faculty of Medicine. During the war he abandoned his studies and joined the anti-fascist Justice and Freedom<\/strong> movement.
\nArrested in 1945, he spent a year at the New Jails. In this period he experimented\u00a0continuous line drawings produced without ever lifting the pencil from the paper.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After Italy’s Liberation from fascism, he decided to devote himself full time to painting, gaining an abstract-expressionism style, which soon led him to adopt the Informal one. His first solo exhibition dates back to 1954, at the La Bussola gallery in Turin.<\/p>\n

In the mid-sixties he began to move away from painting to experiment different materials, such as neon tubes, iron, wax and stone, with which he created the first three-dimensional assemblages, ie the volumetric paintings<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the same years he took part in the Poor art exhibitions together with Michelangelo Pistoletto<\/strong>, Giuseppe Penone<\/strong>, Luciano Fabro<\/strong> and others, becoming a reference point for the group.<\/p>\n

The wind of renewal of ’68 involved him quite soon: Merz started to depict the student’s protest slogans with neon lights.<\/p>\n

In recent years his research is also aimed at archetypal structures such as igloos, created with different materials. From 1970 onwards he used the Fibonacci sequence<\/strong>, made with neon lights as a symbol of the energy within the matter and the organic growth.<\/p>\n

Next to it, the “table”<\/em> appears. From the middle of the decade onwards, it became part of complex installations in which fruit and vegetables stood out and, abandoned to their natural course, introduced a dimension of time into his works.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Mario<\/p>\n

Mario Merz and the return to painting<\/h2>\n

Between the second half of the seventies and the eighties the artist was again engaged in painting: on his large canvases archaic animals such as crocodiles, rhinos and iguanas appeared.<\/p>\n

However, he never abandoned the three-dimensional elements: to igloo, fagots, neon numbers, tables and vegetables were added packs of newspapers. Among the most prestigious exhibitions in which he participated there are: the Venice Biennale<\/strong> (1976, 1978, 1986 and 1997) and Documenta\u00a0IX Kassel<\/strong> (1992).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Founded in 2005, the Merz Foundation<\/strong><\/a>, manages an exhibition space of 1400 square meters of the homonymous archive, consisting of 1000 volumes and a specialized library with 4000 publications).<\/p>\n

For Bolaffi he came up with\u00a0Melpomene<\/a>, published in the series of art\u00a0multiples \u00a0dedicated to The nine muses<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The work of Mario Merz has gone through the twentieth century. Exponent of Poor Art, in his research there are some constant elements: from neon light to igloos, from Fibonacci series to piles of newspapers. Without ever neglecting civil commitment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3630,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,246],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","category-mario-merz-en"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/mario-merz-Melpomene-bolaffi-arte.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.marottaeditori.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}