Marisa Merz’s Inimitable Intersections at Hammer Museum LA
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 is one of those artists who remains undercelebrated and underrecognised because of the circumstances and times in which she lived and worked. But that could be all about to change thanks to the Hammer Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art which together have partnered on a major retrospective of the Italian painter, sculptor, and installation artist.
“Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space” unites five decades of Merz’s work, including her early Arte Povera experiments with non-traditional materials and processes, her fantastical sculptures of heads and faces from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as examples of the large and eclectic yet wonderfully intricate installations of her mid- and late-career.
Merz emerged in the late 1960s as part of the circle of artists associated with Arte Povera. But according to Hammer Director Ann Philbin, as the only female member of the Arte Povera movement, her work has been overlooked for decades. “Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space” aims to redress this injustice and in doing so reveals the real importance of her contribution to the fabric of art history.
At the centre of Merz’s influence is the various modes of balance that characterize her oeuvre – a balance between art and life, intimacy and scale, the abstract and the figurative. What sets her apart is her talent for harmonizing seemingly disparate elements to create poetically organic works that can be at once immense in scale yet intimately intricate in feel.
Working on the very cusp of profound creativity and everyday reality, Merz succeeds in eroding the boundary between art and life. Her uncompromising dedication to her artistic practice as a central part of her existence, combined with her natural affinity with the materials she used, give her works an incredible sense of narrative and humanness that helps foster a deep connection with the viewer."— Nicholas Forrest, Jul. 20, 2017
Read the full article at the Blouin Art Info website.