For more than thirty years now, Mario Merz has been enriching the world with his art. It is an art which, in the face of ever advancing technology,seems both archaic and timeless, free from the traits of modernism and unperturbed by the constraints of contemporary art. The characteristic features of his art - the igloos, the Fibonacci sequences, the faggots, the fruit and vegetables, the tables and the neon lights - have become familiar apparitions all over the world, apparitions which refer to the need for the elementary and the fundamental, for those basic things in life which have been totally neglected by our civilization.

Merz's artworks express transience and temporality and have the symbolic force of a world of their own, a world in which the notion of wealth has no meaning. "Time as the path along which humanity must live its life" (Mario Merz) is their central motif. The best known element of Mario Merz's vocabulary of forms is the igloo. This makes its appearance in countless shapes and in a diversity of materials, such as glass, stones, fabric, twigs and wax, and symbolizes, throughout the entire world, the nomadism of the human being, for whom nothing is certain or eternal.

As a significant exponent of Arte Povera, Mario Merz introduced new materials into art around the mid-sixties. After starting out as a painter, he began working with stones, branches, neon lights and glass. He was not the only artist at that time to experiment with spatial compositions using simple, commonplace materials. Indeed, it was precisely in Italy that there was a growing interest in those found or worked materials whose energy and mystical quality could be conveyed through the medium of art. Artists such as Giuseppe Penone, Giovanni Anselmo, Michelangelo Pistoletto,Luciano Fabro, Alighiero Boetti and Gilberto Zorio all had in common a striving for extreme simplicity of means. The resultant works of art contrasted sharply with the American art of the sixties, especially with Minimal Art and its industrially produced, geometrically structured sculptures.

Vorwort

Preface

Guido de Werd

Das solidarische Tier

Animal solidarity

Guy Tosatto

Die panische Zeichnung des Mario Merz

The panic drawing of Mario Merz

Daniel Soutif

Pittore in Africa

Die Grenzgange des Mario Merz

Pittore in Africa

The border crossings of Mario Merz

Alain Cueff

Index der Werke

Index of works

Biographie

Biography