Musei Civici di Verona – Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti and ArtVerona in collaboration with Fondazione Merz present the exhibition Mario Merz. Il numero è un animale vivente.
A key figure of Arte Povera and of international renown, Mario Merz made the interpenetration between work and environment the core of his research, and the exhibition itinerary conceived by curators Patrizia Nuzzo (Head of the Collections of Modern and Contemporary Art), and Stefano Raimondi (Artistic Director of ArtVerona), with loans from the partnership with the Fondazione Merz, focuses precisely on the archetypal elements that constantly return in the artist’s production.
The term Habitat is declined here in its most intimate and profound meaning of living space: the hemispherical and open form of the igloo highlights the mutual invasion between work and environment, between internal and external, individual and collective dimensions. Contributing to the idea of circularity is the spiral nature of the Fibonacci numerical series, invented by the Tuscan mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in 1202 as a progressive sequence that determines the growth processes of the natural world, in which each number is the sum of the previous two.This numerical succession traces the outline of a continuously expanding system that results in a ceaseless proliferation of forms.
The element of the table, which the artist conceives of as a ‘raised piece of ground’, merges with the surrounding environment, which increasingly takes on the features of a landscape that is both foreign and familiar, distant and very close, inhabited by primary and archetypal structures that transcend the distinctions between organic and inorganic matter.
The reflection on the cyclical nature of things in Mario Merz’s poetics does not only concern space but also, and above all, time. In fact, the dark and enigmatic silhouettes of prehistoric animals stand out against the white support like sudden apparitions from a distant geological era, becoming emblematic of a formal register that draws on a remote and ancestral imagery, capable of leading the viewer back to a pre-rational dimension of existence.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Manfredi Edizioni with critical contributions by the curators, Patrizia Nuzzo and Stefano Raimondi, as well as by the art historian and essayist, director of the National Museums of Perugia and the Regional Directorate of Museums of Umbria, Costantino D’Orazio. A clear historical-critical account by Milena Cordioli will retrace and document the rich exhibition history of one of the most compelling protagonists of Arte Povera.
