Fondazione Merz

Mario Merz

29 April – 2 October 2005

 

The exhibition follow on from the two exhibitions hosted  by the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and by the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea as Turin’s homage to the artist, who died recently.

The inaugural exhibition brings together exceptional selected works without maintaining a chronological order, so as to highlight one of the artist’s major features: the absence of time. “For me, time continues and does not stop; when it returns, it is the same time, even though it has become different. This sense of not having the sense of time draws me closer in a manner that is neither systematic, nor mental, but above all physical to some Oriental ways of thinking, which have no sense of time expired” (Mario Merz).

The exhibition includes more than 30 works, including a selection of installations, drawings and paintings exhibited in the most significant one-man and group shows and since then never again shown in public. On enormous canvases, prehistoric wild animals such as the rhinoceros, crocodile, tiger and owl will come to life and hold a dialogue with igloos and tables, structures that have always formed part of Merz’s stock in trade.

The exhibition springs from the importance that the location and its intense memory hold when taking in the works and interacting with them. The works slot into the interior and exterior spaces, holding a dialogue with the structure and imparting the immediate sensation of forming a veritable “landscape”, whilst respecting the artist’s poetry. “The home is a relationship between space and time. Time is the creator and destroyer of space. Space is not independent and static. Space is controlled by time” (Mario Merz).