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