Marisa Merz

Italy, 1926 – 2019

The only female representative of the Arte Povera movement and a major exponent of the Italian art scene since the 1960s. Merz stood out for having followed her own personal and independent artistic path. Her solo shows in museums include major exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1995 and 2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1996); Galleria d’Arte Moderna Villa delle Rose, Bologna (1998); Museo MADRE, Naples (2007); Centre international d’art et du paysage, Ile de Vassivière (2010); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2011); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2012); Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); Macro Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2016). Recently, she also held the solo show The Sky Is a Great Space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017), at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2018). After taking part in several editions of the Venice Biennale since 1972, she was awarded the Special Jury Prize in 2001 and in 2013 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The elements displayed in her works form a philosophical and complex system of thinking in which faces or figures are realized through the superimposition of signs and materials, by means of an original form, refined over the years with rigor and vision. They highlight the artist’s work on the elaboration of faces on “figures”; a theme that, for her, was not merely recurring but almost obsessive. Marisa Merz’s work is the revelation of a self, a succession of unknown and transfigured, but profoundly real faces.

Presented by Giorgio Persano.