Marisa Merz Takes the Spotlight at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum
Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space at the Hammer Museum brings together five decades of works by the Italian painter, sculptor, and installation artist Marisa Merz. This survey will be the first retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States and will be accompanied by the first monograph to be published in English. Bringing together five decades of work–from her early, Arte Povera experiments with non-traditional art materials and processes; to the enigmatic heads and faces she created in the 1980s and 1990s; to mid- and late-career installations that balance intimacy with impressive scale–the exhibition will explore the prodigious talent and influence of Merz’s understudied body of work.
"Marisa Merz’s The Sky is a Great Space at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is a thoughtful and in-depth look at an artist who, as the exhibition rightfully argues, has yet to receive her proper due. One of the leaders of the Arte Povera movement in Italy, she never received the same attention as her colleagues Michelangelo Pistoletto and Enrico Castellani. The Sky is a Great Space, then, has the tricky task of presenting Merz’s work to the mostly-fresh eyes of the viewing public in a compelling way, while also not drowning said public in too much new information and material, while at the same time still creating an exhibition that works on its own terms in a curatorial and thematic way. Fortunately, The Sky is a Great Space manages to walk this tightrope quite well.
When doing a retrospective of an artist with a multi-decade career like Marisa Merz, the question of presentation quickly arises: is it better to present works chronologically to show the artist’s development and growth in the macro sense, or to group works by medium to show a more micro look at how the artist evolved their use of each medium? The Sky is a Great Space largely goes the former route, though, luckily for the curators, Merz seems to have made works of a similar enough type within the same time frame often enough that there is still a general visual coherence.
The first room of The Sky is a Great Space is downright playful, taken in the show’s larger context, because it almost buries the lede in terms of what to expect for those viewers unfamiliar with Merz (like myself). The first room is populated solely with sculptures both big and small, made of metal and household materials in a limited color palette of silver, beige, black, ocher, tan, and white. The rest of Merz’s output as displayed, then, becomes a pleasant surprise, and very nearly a shock, with its bolder use of brighter colors, as well as its general disregard for the boundaries of two-dimensional versus three-dimensional media."— Deborah Krieger, Jul. 2017
Read the full article at the White Hot Magazine website.