Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 17:58 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 31 July 2019
8 Obituaries
M
arisa Merz ,
who has
died aged 93,
was the only
female artist
associated
with arte
povera, the
late-1960s Italian movement that
favoured everyday, throwaway
materials over traditional media
such as oil paint and marble. Her
sculptures of rolled-up blankets ,
held together with copper wire and
tape, and abandoned on the beach,
featured alongside th ose of Jannis
Kounellis , Michelangelo Pistoletto
and her husband, Mario Merz ,
in the 1968 landmark exhibition
Arte Povera + Azioni Povere on the
southern Amalfi coast. A series of
tiny threaded shoes, the fi rst of
many references to her daughter to
be found in Merz’s work, were also
left out on the sand, perilously close
to the incoming tide.
The show was curated by
Germano Celant, who had
fo mented his manifesto, ArteMarisa Merz
Sculptor committed to
using everyday materials
and the lo-fi ethos of the
arte povera movement
The living sculptures had formed
Merz’s debut solo show in June
1967 at the Enzo Sperone gallery
and that December at the Piper
Pluri Club, a Turin disco that had
opened the year before to host
radical artistic happenings, and
reappeared thr oughout her career.
The y doubled as scenery in Il Mostre
Verde (1967), a short fi lm made by
Tonino De Bernardi , which was
screened at Pistol etto’s studio.
Pistol etto lived in the same block as
Marisa and Mario, as did their fellow
arte povera artist Giuseppe Penone.
Though Marisa was part of
an experimental scene, her art
was integrally entangled with
motherhood and home. “There
was Beatrice, still very little,” she
wrote of her daughter in 1975. “She’d
ask me things, I’d get up and I’d
do them. Everything was on the
same level, Bea and the things I was
sewing .” A 1968 work , spelling out
her daughter’s name in woven nylon
and wire, has become one of Merz’s
best known, belying its simplicity;
Altalena per Bea of the same year, an
elegant swing constructed in dark
wood, doubled as a toy for the child.
The artist refused to formally
name or date her works. Artmaking,
she claimed, operated “beyondPovera: Notes for a Guerrilla War,
a year earlier in the kitchen of the
Merzes’ grand Turin apartment.
The phrase “poor art” did not refer
to the works’ value but rather the
artists’ commitment, in Celant’s
words, to “contingency, to events, to
the non-historical, to the present”,
as opposed to the commercial
demands of the art market. While
Mario is name d in the text, Marisa is
not mentioned. In 1968 she released
her own statement, one of the rare
occasions she made any public
comment : “I’m not interested in
power or in career; only myself and
the world interest me. I can do little,
very little. I am battling against
malice and competition. I cannot
escape the reality I see.”
The same kitchen had housed the
fi rst of what she termed her “living
sculptures”, sheets of aluminium
twisted and stapled into tubes and
hung from the ceiling. Initially
occupying a space above the cooker,
they eventually colonised the entire
residence, creeping behind the
television and over the dining table.time”. Nor was it clear what was her
labour and wh at was her husband’s ;
both work ed on each other’s art in
neighbouring rooms. Tommaso
Trini, an Italian critic and a long time
champion of the artist, wrote that
“Marisa divided herself into Marisa
and Mario. Mario divided himself in
Mario and Marisa. An extraordinary
community, in which identifi cation
has resisted the individualism that
separates the names.”
Likewise, she always refused to
divulge details of her life prior to
1960, the year she married Mario.
She was born in Turin, her father a
Fiat car factory worker. As a teenager
she studied classical ballet and
modelled for Felice Casorati , the
Torinese fi gurative painter. Having
started to move in Turin’s artistic
circles, she met and married Mario ,
who, after Marisa became pregnant
the same year, suggested the child be
born in Switzerland, where he had
ancestry. The couple set out by train
for Zurich, only to disembark on a
whim at the small village of Frutigen
in the Alps, where they would settle
for three years. By the time they
returned to Italy, the couple had
decided they were artists.
At the 1972 Venice Biennale
they exhibited together , the year
Celant retired the term he coined.
The artists, however, remained
committed to its lo-fi ethos. Two
years later Marisa returned to
show a wall of small copper mesh
sculptures under her own name.
In 1977 she had a solo exhibition
at Galleria Salvatore Ala in Milan,
which featured knitting needles,
dying fl owers, bowls and fruit.
These allusions to the domestic
environment were embraced by the
burgeoning feminist art movement
involving contemporaries such as
Carol Rama and Carla Accardi.
In 1982 she began to make unfi red
clay heads, deformed but never
monstrous, a body of work that
proliferated for more than a decade.
She exhibited again at the Venice
Biennale in 1986, and Documenta in
Kassel in 1992. Two years later Merz
had her fi rst US show at Barbara
Gladstone, a gallery at which she
would exhibit regularly. Her fi rst
of many retrospectives came in
1995, at Kunst Museum Winterthur ,
Switzerland, and they culminated
in a 2017 survey that toured the US,
Portugal and Austria.
After Mario died in 2003, Marisa
left his studio untouched. She
continued to make art into her 90s,
keeping to a strict routine each
day, largely refusing guests, but
producing large drawings of angels
and Madonnas, clambering up on to
a step ladder to reach the top of the
two-metre sheets of paper.
Merz was awarded the Golden
Lion for lifetime achievement at the
Venice Biennale in 2013, the year
of her solo show at the Serpentine
gallery in London.
She is survived by Beatrice.
Oliver BascianoMarisa Merz, artist, born 23 May
1926; died 19 July 2019An artwork
fashioned as an
item of footwear
from copper
wire by Merz,
below. Her art
was intricately
entangled with
motherhood and
home
RENATO GHIAZZA,
GIANFRANCO GORGONIThe artist
refused to
formally
name or
date her
works. Art
making,
she
claimed,
operated
beyond
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