Marisa Merz
Marisa Merz
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is pleased to present Untitled (1982–84), Marisa Merz’s sculpture – a barely sketched plaster face resting on a pedestal at the center of the scene.
If Untitled
belongs to the series of Testine
begun in the late 1970s and developed over more than four decades, what is presented here resembles almost a mask, emphasizing the centrality of the face and its components. It lies gently upon the pedestal’s surface, at once a display device – since the artist chooses to present her work in this way – and part of the work itself.
Fine and delicate, the face is fleetingly outlined in the material, whose softness plays against the rigidity of the metal pedestal. This tension prevents the sculpture from taking on a definitive form, instead suggesting a continual process of transformation.
The pedestal, by contrast, is rigid, simple, and overt: it offers support, yet shares with the figure a certain fragility. The height of its legs – thin as those of an insect – accentuates the imbalance with the sculpture, making it even more elusive and provisional. At the top of the pedestal, the face thus seems to be in danger, as if it might fall at any moment.
The sense of transience in the Testine bears witness to the artist’s ongoing inquiry, which is not directed toward the revelation of a final form. There is no precise goal, no fixed shape to be reached, but rather a continuous act of making. Success and failure lose their distinction; they merge into a single gesture. In this way, the study of the figure is overturned: it is not about fixing a face in its defining features, but about attempting to do so – to see what comes of the effort – while acknowledging, in some sense, the impossibility of fully conveying one’s own vision of it. The face, as Emmanuel Levinas
writes, is the place where the Other bursts forth before us and resists being captured by sensible intuition: “To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself beyond form.”
Merz, for her part, insists on non-definitive forms – on the fact that their value remains intact even when they are not brought to completion. Unaffected by the passage of time, Tommaso Trini describes them as “prefigures”. These images are inscribed within a temporal line – they announce what could one day take shape, they precede form – yet they resist any true definition. Merz therefore models, often using her own body, shaping matter with her fingers, elbows, and hands. It is a physical yet gentle process – a different kind of strength, a different kind of urgency. The urge to give form is certainly present, but rather than asserting itself definitively in the work, the artist lets it go, granting it autonomy.
The figurative approach is another distinctive element of her practice. We stand before a face, revealing Merz’s desire to represent what she sees – her everyday life; indeed, the artist does not believe in a separation between art and life. But the face also represents herself: a vision, as Catherine Grenier writes, that emerges “from the depths of Chaos, where the figure of the Woman and the face of the artist intertwine and merge.” It is therefore an opportunity to observe what happens when one tries to represent a human face: matter and figure wrestle with one another. Is it the face sinking into the material, seeking to master it, or the material that is absorbing and dissolving it? Or is it, rather, a movement outward – where it is unclear whether the matter is rejecting the face, or the face itself struggling to break free, as if imprisoned within it?
We will never know the outcome of this struggle.
We stand before a face, which the artist presents to us on a pedestal. It is what we see every day, yet also what constantly eludes us – or perhaps what begins to come into being precisely at the moment it is seen.
The Artist
Marisa Merz was born on May 23, 1926, in Turin, where, from adolescence, she became involved in the city’s rich cultural scene, marked by the legacy of the Casorati school. She made her artistic debut in the 1960s with her Living Sculptures—aluminum sheet works made up of several spiral-shaped elements, so mobile and irregular that they earned the name “living.” Rooted in material experimentation and a sense of essential design, these early works—presented by Sperone in Turin as early as June 1967—anticipated and prepared the artist’s participation in the Arte Povera movement.
Merz brought into the language of contemporary sculpture artisanal techniques and handcrafted objects drawn from tradition, often associated with women’s domestic labor, giving full artistic dignity to everyday materials and processes. In doing so, she distanced herself both from the poetics of the primary structures of minimalism—rational and self-referential—and from the Arte Povera group itself, toward which she displayed, from the outset, an eccentric sensibility.
From the mid-1970s onward, Merz’s interventions took on a fully environmental character, beginning with a series of rooms that she arranged in complementary spaces: the open and public setting of the gallery, and the underground, secret space of a cellar. This continuous movement between the private and the public dimension became an uninterrupted metamorphosis—engraved traces transforming into sculptural forms, and material physicality turning into painted chromatic tones. It was at this point that her interest in the human face emerged, rendered in two or three dimensions through drawings and paintings, or in clay, plaster, and wax sculptures. Also “living sculptures,” the testine that would accompany the artist for over forty years are, as Catherine Grenier writes, “visions brought forth from the depths of Chaos, where the figure of Woman and the face of the artist intertwine and merge,” or, as Tommaso Trini describes them, “pre-figures,” whose autonomy unfolds in an unprecedented sculptural chiaroscuro that indefinitely postpones any final form (Rudi Fuchs).
“To think of things as formless,” Trini also wrote, “allows them to be freed both from the real and from the unreal. In the circularity between light and darkness, a final form can find its place, being reborn at the beginning of all things.”
In the 1980s, the various voices through which Merz’s creativity had always expressed itself reached their perfect synthesis and full maturity: in the dense yet delicate testine, in her exquisitely refined drawings on paper, and in her polymaterial altarpieces. This is attested by her solo exhibitions in the Bernier Gallery (Athens), Fischer Gallery (Düsseldorf), Tucci Russo Gallery (Turin); her invitations to the Venice Biennale and to Documenta; and her participation in major group exhibitions. After the 1980 Venice Biennale, she exhibited in Paris in Identité italienne. L’art en Italie depuis 1959, curated by Germano Celant for the Centre Pompidou (1981); then in Rome at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni for Avanguardia. Transavanguardia, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (1982), the same year she also took part in Documenta.
In the years that followed, the artist made her already rare public appearances even more infrequent. Among her museum solo shows were: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994); Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1995 and 2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1996); Galleria d’Arte Moderna Villa delle Rose, Bologna (1998); Museo MADRE, Naples (2007); Centre international d’art et du paysage, Île de Vassivière (2010); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2011); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2012); Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); and MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2016).
In 2017, her first major American retrospective, The Sky Is a Great Space, was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, later traveling to the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto and the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg in 2018. Having participated in multiple editions of the Venice Biennale since 1972, Merz received the Special Jury Prize there in 2001, and in 2013 was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Marisa Merz passed away in Turin on July 19, 2019. Two months later, her final solo exhibition, Geometrie sconnesse palpiti geometrici, opened at the MASI in Lugano.
In 2021, the Fondazione Merz organized a dual exhibition titled La punta di matita può eseguire un sorpasso di coscienza (“The Pencil Tip Can Perform an Overtaking of Consciousness”), featuring mostly unpublished works by Marisa and Mario Merz. The following year, the Musée Rath in Geneva hosted the couple in an extensive retrospective. In 2023, the MAXXI in L’Aquila paired Marisa Merz with Indian artist Shilpa Gupta in a two-voice dialogue titled visibileinvisibile. In 2024, thirty years after her “French” solo show organized by the Centre Pompidou, LaM in Lille presented an elegant retrospective titled Listening to Space, featuring previously unseen works and a special section dedicated to the artist’s archive; the exhibition was scheduled to travel to the Kunstmuseum in Bern and the Fridericianum in Kassel in 2025.
- Merz Foundation