The work of Mario and Marisa Merz in an unpublished dialogue at the Merz Foundation in Turin

As soon as the museums can reopen, the Merz Foundation in Turin will kick off the exhibition Marisa and Mario Merz. The Tip of the Pencil Can Perform a Surprise of Consciousness: curated by Mariano Boggia, it is an unprecedented exhibition project centered on the figures of Mario Merz (Milan, 1925 - Turin, 2003) and Marisa Merz (Maria Luisa Truccato; Turin, 1926 - 2019), with the aim of constructing a first possible answer to the question of the role, today, of a cultural institution such as the Foundation itself. The project presents the work of Marisa and Mario Merz according to new points of view: for the first time, their works meet in a unified path, designed to recreate the dialogical dimension, the intense and profound exchange on the mutual practices they always exercised, while maintaining individual points of view. The title of the exhibition is an explicit quotation of a phrase by Mario Merz that leads back to the common ground of artistic practice as a starting point for the prefiguration of unknown worlds.

“Presenting the works of Marisa and Mario Merz together means having the opportunity to grasp two different but intimately connected and interacting modes of expression,” Mariano Boggia explains. “Marisa and Mario always live and show together; it is impossible to separate them. Together they work in the domestic spaces of the home; together they move through the world exerting each on the other, stimulation, encouragement and protection.”

The exhibition project aims to emphasize how the quality and energy imprinted in the works of the two artists are the same, albeit of different values, and offers the visitor an opportunity for reflection on their consideration of time and space as well. Marisa and Mario stand side by side in a continuity of artistic creation that alters the very nature of time, an “infinite present time” that binds them in life, in sharing, in discussion and in critical construction, while leaving artistic production free and unique.

It is the “infinite present time” the dimension in which every day Marisa devotes herself to studying the structure of women’s faces through drawing, painting, and sculpture. Sometimes these works are placed in environments crossed by plots of copper wire, in a temporal bridge that unites, actualizing them, artistic outcomes of distant moments. And it is always the “infinite present time” that also envelops Mario’s activity, who on each occasion has reinvented his igloo through the use of always different materials, drawing from time to time a landscape inhabited by new species of animals and plants, images of a reinvented and reclassified nature.

Like time, space is also reinvented: the domestic dimension is no different from the museum dimension: as in their home-studio, in the Foundation the environment presents a dense weave of drawings, sculptures, objects and is marked by the neon of Fibonacci numbers, in a vertigo that re-proposes Mario’s question of whether space is curved or straight. Thus, the exhibition aims to immerse the visitor in a continuous dialogue, discovering even unpublished works, in the continuation of the infinite present time inhabited by Marisa and Mario Merz.

In the photo: Mario and Marisa Merz

The work of Mario and Marisa Merz in an unpublished dialogue at the Merz Foundation in Turin

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