Mario Merz at MOCA (English and Italian Edition)

Mario Merz (1925 - 2003) was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz. Born in Milano, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke-not removing his pencil point from the paper. He explored the relationship between nature and the subject, until he had his first exhibitions in the intellectually incendiary context of Turin in the 1950s, a cultural climate fed by such writers as Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Ezra Pound. He met Marisa Merz during his studies in Turin in the 1950s. They were associated with the development of Arte Povera, and they were both influenced by each other's works. Merz discarded abstract expressionism's subjectivity in favor of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas. From the mid-1960s, his paintings echoed his desire to explore the transmission of energy from the organic to the inorganic, a curiosity that led him to create works in which neon lights pierced everyday objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle or his own raincoat. Without ever using ready-made objects as "things" (at least to the extent that the Nouveau Realistes in France did), Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context. This book was published on the occasion of the Mario Merz Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and the Incontri Internazionali d'Arte in Rome to celebrate a series of installations for MOCA's California Plaza facility.