Merz, Mario

Mario Mertz
Mario Mertz
Birth name	Mario merz
Date of Birth	January 1, 1925
Place of Birth	Milan , Italy
Date of death	November 9, 2003 (78 years)
Place of death	Turin , Italy
A country	; ; ;
Style	arte povera
Awards	[d] Imperial Prize
Site

Mario Merz ( Italian. Mario Merz , January 1 , 1925 , Milan - November 9, 2003 , Turin ) - Italian artist, representative of the “ arte povera ” direction. In his works he used simple (“poor”) materials, seeking to create unusual and having a strong artistic impact effects.

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Biography

Mario Mertz was born on January 1, 1925 in Milan . He grew up in Turin, attended two years of medical school at the University of Turin . During the Second World War, he joined the anti-fascist group Giustizia e Libertà, was arrested in 1945 and imprisoned. In 1950, Mertz began writing; his first solo exhibition was held at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin in 1954. By 1966, he began to pierce canvases and objects with neon tubes.

In 1967, he teamed up with several artists, including Giovanni Anselmo , Aligiero Boetti , Luciano Fabro , Jannis Cunellis , Giulio Paolini , Giuseppe Penone , Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio, who became members of the art artera movement , which was given by the critic and curator Jura Jourio Zorio, who was named by the critic and the curator Jurabio Zorio . This movement was marked by anti-elite aesthetics; its members created their works from waste materials of everyday life and the organic world in protest against the inhuman nature of industrialization and consumer capitalism.

In 1968, Mertz began using his “trademark” motif — the needle . In 1970, the artist began to apply the formula for the mathematical progression of Fibonacci in his works. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis , in 1972, he added packs of newspapers, archetypal animals and motorcycles to his iconography, supplemented later with tables, as a symbol of human need for saturation and interaction.

Needle

Stone Needle (1982)

The quasi-techological needle, symbolizing the survival of the nomads in the midst of dramatic cultural changes, was a kind of Merz skate. Merz has used hemispherical needle shapes since 1968 . He collected rounded structures from metal fittings, covered them with a grid, pieces of clay, wax, dirt, burlap or leather, pieces of glass, bundles of branches. Phrases with political or literary references laid out by neon often covered the dome. An early example, Giap Igloo (1968), says a Vietnamese military strategist, General Wu Nguyen Giap (Vo Nguyen Giap): “If the enemy gathers strength, he loses his land; if it disperses, it loses its strength ”(If the enemy masses its forces, he loses ground; if he scatters, he loses strength). The contradictory nature of this phrase reflects the concept of the needle as a temporary shelter, which, despite the eternal movement, remains unchanged.

Merz often used materials for the igloo of the places where the exhibitions took place to emphasize the nomadic nature of the igloo and the proximity of the environment. So, for an exhibition in 1979 in Australia, he used eucalyptus leaves to cover a needle. Merz also changed the scale of the structures and the complexity of the design - later examples were with curved tables, surrounded by bundles of newspapers or grouped. Unreal City , created for the Guggenheim Museum on the occasion of the artist's retrospectives in 1989, was a three-part igloo: a large glass-covered structure is transparent and opens up smaller wooden and rubber versions hidden inside. As in all sculptures of Merz, the work embodies beauty and violence: broken glass fragments are delicate and dangerous at the same time. The neon phrase "Città irreale" ("unreal city" in Italian) is located on the wire mesh of the dome.

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Literature

Germano Celant. Arte povera. - Milano: G. Mazzotta Editore, 1969. - 240 p.