Marisa Merz & Mario Merz

One of Marisa Merz’s first works were the Living Sculptures, which she created since 1966. She installed it hanging from the kitchen ceiling of her apartment and then, in 1967, at the Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery in Turin. Merz subsequently produced further Living Sculptures. She said of this early creative period: ‘When my daughter Bea was still small, I stayed at home with her. At the time I was making works with sheets of aluminium. I cut these things out and sewed them together, there was a rhythm to it all, as well as a time, a lot of time. Everything was of equal priority, Bea, the things I sewed; I was equally available to everything’. This was followed by two years of ‘stagnation’ when she did not create any works of art and dedicating herself entirely to her daughter.

Merz’s work was initially done in private – concurrently to the Italian art movement Arte Povera. Germano Celant, who coined the term in 1967, did not include her in his first exhibition on Arte Povera. She was nevertheless sharing her colleagues’ interest in raw materials, the relationship between sculpture and space as well as the one between art and life. The artist’s bend objects produced from aluminium foil fill the whole space. They are reminiscent of living, organically technoid, hybrid creatures. Tonino De Bernardi and Paolo Menzio also employed them in 1967 in their short film Il mostro verde (The Green Monster) as a monster’s entrails.