Artissima 2026: Thomas Dane Gallery brings artist Marisa Merz home for her Turin centenary

Marisa Merz made art from what a household keeps close: copper wire knitted like wool, wax, clay, the small slippers she wore. For decades she was the lone woman at the edge of Arte Povera, working at home in Turin while her husband Mario Merz’s igloos took the spotlight. A century after her birth, the artist is the subject of a retrospective spread across three Turin institutions, and Thomas Dane Gallery has built its stand at this year’s Artissima around her, the fair’s preview falling on the day the museum show opens.

The gallery leads with a single untitled, undated Merz: a tall, unframed sheet leaning against a white wall, where a pale, mask-like face rises out of clouds of sprayed blue and a flare of gold lines, dotted with small rust-coloured discs. It is a motif she returned to for decades, the face as something half-drawn and half-dissolved, closer to an apparition than a portrait.

Marisa Merz painting Senza Titolo, a pale face amid swirling blue and gold lines on a large unframed sheet leaning against a white wall — Marisa Merz, Senza Titolo, n.d. © Fondazione Merz. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery

Around her, the stand gathers eleven other artists from the gallery’s roster: Igshaan Adams, Luigi Ghirri, Jake Grewal, Patricia Leite, Glenn Ligon, Jean-Luc Moulène, Catherine Opie, Paul Pfeiffer, Amie Siegel, Jimmy Wright and Akram Zaatari. The range runs from Ghirri’s quiet colour photographs of the Italian everyday to Ligon’s text-driven work on language and race: a fair booth is also an argument about company.

The retrospective, La danza delle ore (The Dance of the Hours), divides Merz’s work between the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, the Fondazione Merz and GAM, the city’s civic gallery of modern and contemporary art. Merz was born in Turin in 1926, won the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2013 Venice Biennale and died in 2019. According to the gallery, the show includes works never exhibited before and is organised around three ideas: process and material, everyday time with the home as an “alchemical laboratory”, and space as both a physical and a metaphysical place. Curators from each venue, among them Beatrice Merz at the Fondazione, have shaped it together.

The home-as-laboratory idea is caught best in Claudio Abate’s photograph of Merz at Rome’s Galleria L’Attico in 1975: seated by an open window at night, her back to the camera, her feet in knitted slippers pressed against the wall. The work is worn, not displayed.

Marisa Merz seen from behind, seated by an open window at night, her feet in knitted slippers raised against the wall — Marisa Merz wearing Scarpette, Galleria L’Attico, Rome, 1975. Photo: Claudio Abate. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery

Amie Siegel, whose films trace the hidden lives of objects, will discuss I diseredati / The Dispossessed in a conversation titled Reverse Archaeology at the Museo Egizio. Paul Pfeiffer appears in Broken. The Power of the Fragment at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, while the gallery’s Naples space shows Cecily Brown’s A sunset, a ruin, a crowd, and a battle.

Artissima, in its 33rd edition under director Luigi Fassi, runs at the Oval Lingotto from 30 October to 1 November after an invitation-only preview on 29 October. Thomas Dane Gallery’s stand is listed at Hallway Yellow 10 / Dark Blue 9. La danza delle ore runs from 29 October to 4 April 2027, Siegel speaks on 31 October, the Strozzi show continues until 24 January 2027 and Cecily Brown stays in Naples until 19 December.

For an artist who worked at the scale of a hand and a kitchen table, the centenary does something unusual: it lets a whole city keep her hours.

Tags: Thomas Dane Gallery, Amie Siegel, art fairs, Paul Pfeiffer, Arte Povera, Artissima