The retrospective is organized in the United States by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in cooperation with the Fondazione Merz, Turin.
Curated by Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, and Ian Alteveer, Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The presentation in Europe is jointly organized by the Fundação de Serralves—Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

As the only female representative of the Arte Povera movement and a major protagonist in the Italian art scene of the 1960s, Marisa Merz stands out for having followed her own reserved and independent artistic path. Through her research she has explored a variety of mixed media and processes, ranging from drawing to sculpture, from painting to installations, and she has embraced traditional feminine crafts, such as needlework and weaving to emphasize the importance of handcrafting in art.

Marisa Merz’s oeuvre crystallizes the ephemeral while floating between public space and her private sphere made up of personal memories.

In the 1970s she began creating her first works as an expansion of her domesticity: they consist of swirling, mobile and irregular structures made of aluminum sheets (Living sculptures) and light objects delicately made from copper wire and knitting needles.

In the mid-1970s, the artist began sculpting a series of small heads molded from unfired clay and     sometimes coated  with luminous pigments or gilding, and encased in wax.

Simultaneously, and to this day, Marisa Merz has continued to create drawings and paintings, whose recurring subjects are mainly female features and faces. Their figures emerge in rapidly traced arabesque lines and seem to be detached from any context, being fixed in a state where they remain suspended in time.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue published by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.