20 Facts About Mario Merz

Mario Merz was an Italian artist, and husband of Marisa Merz.

Mario Merz 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.

Mario Merz met Marisa Merz during his studies in Turin in the 1950s.

Mario Merz discarded abstract expressionism's subjectivity in favour of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas.

From 1969 Mario Merz employed the Fibonacci sequence in performances and installations throughout his career to represent the universal principles of creation and growth: climbing up the Guggenheim Museum in New York or the spire of a Turin landmark, or perched in neon on a stack of newspapers among the old masters of Naples' Capodimonte Gallery.

Mario Merz's 1973 show at the John Weber Gallery in New York expressed the Fibonacci in a series of low modular tables.

An installation of Fibonacci numbers by Mario Merz is the landmark of the Centre for International Light Art in Unna, Germany.

Mario Merz made big spaces feel human, intimate and natural.

Mario Merz was intrigued by the powerful as well as the small and applied both to his drawing.

In 1968 Mario Merz began to work on his famous igloos and continued throughout his life, revealing the prehistoric and tribal features hidden within the present time and space.

Mario Merz saw the mobility of this typical shelter for nomadic wandering as an ideal metaphor for the space of the artist.

Mario Merz said: "Space is curved, the earth is curved, everything on earth is curved" and subsequently produced large curvilinear installations like the one at the Guggenheim in New York.

Mario Merz had the wild, immediate perceptiveness of a child.

Mario Merz's works encapsulate this nature together with an uncanny universality and versatility.

In 1996, Mario Merz collaborated with Jil Sander on a fashion show, including a wind tunnel of sheer white fabric twisted and filled with blowing leaves.

Mario Merz had his first one-man exhibition, in 1954, at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin; his first solo European museum exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975.

Mario Merz has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundacao de Serralves, Porto; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London ; Moderna Museet, Stockholm ; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Fundacion Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York ; a two-venue retrospective at Castello di Rivoli and Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Turin.

Mario Merz was awarded the Ambrogino Gold Prize, Milan; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel; and the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture.

Mario Merz was the subject of an atmospheric film, Mario Merz, shot during the summer of 2002 in San Gimignano by the British artist Tacita Dean.

In 2022, the Fondazione Mario Merz opened an outpost in Palermo.