Marisa Merz. Il cielo è grande spazio / The Sky Is a Great Space

In one of my last exhibitions at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, I was able to celebrate the artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019 Turin, Italy) with an exhibition spanning five decades. Il cielo è grande spazio / The Sky Is a Great Space was the first solo exhibition by Marisa Merz in Austria and in German-speaking countries for over ten years.

In the 1960s, Merz translated the interplay between her roles as artist, wife, and mother into a unique artistic idiom. Defying the formal conventions of visual art, she largely relied on soft, easily malleable  materials such as aluminum, copper wire, nylon, wax, and unfired clay. To the artist’s mind, her work was not a chronological succession of self-contained objects; she left most of her pieces untitled and undated and remade and transformed shapes and elements of works in varying arrangements.

Marisa Merz is regarded as the only female protagonist of Arte Povera, a loose association of artists working in Genoa, Turin, and Rome that also includes her husband Mario (1925–2003). The Poveristi—the label was coined by the late critic and curator Germano Celant to describe their work in 1967—drew attention with works based on “poor” and mundane materials. The monumental aluminum “Living Sculpture” (1966), which came into being in Marisa Merz’s apartment and grew into a sprawling installation, was first on public display at Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone 1967 in Turin. Although she articulated the unity of art and life perhaps more radically than any other artist, her work and her influence on others are still not widely recognized in the international art world until late in her career.

With this exhibition—the title quotes a poem by the artist—the Museum der Moderne Salzburg was the first institution in Austria to host Marisa Merz’s art in a literal “great space.” The most recent pieces were the point of departure for an exploration of the oeuvre that included her paintings, drawings, and enigmatic sculptural heads and faces from the 1990s and 1980s and reached back to the artist’s beginnings in the 1960s. Marisa Merz’s poems in the original Italian rounded out the installation. A selection of her poems printed on the gallery walls were exhibited for the first time.

DelMonico Books Prestel has released a publication (in English) accompanying the exhibition. A catalogue containing a selection of texts in German translation was published by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

A one-day symposium on Women Artists Exhibition took place on May 25, 2018, with presentations by MdMS-director Sabine Breitwieser; Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Silvia Eiblmayr, curator, Vienna; VALIE EXPORT, artist, Vienna; Sabine Fellner & Andrea Winklbauer, curators, Vienna.