Marisa Merz, the Arte Povera Artist Whose Work Began in Her Kitchen

Marisa Merz

Born	May 23, 1931 Turin
Died	July 19, 2019 (88)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Special Jury Prize · Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

The first great sculpture Marisa Merz made did not leave home for months. She cut aluminium sheeting with shears, stapled the strips into coils and spirals, and hung them from the kitchen ceiling of the Turin flat she shared with the artist Mario Merz, until the shapes crept into the living room and wrapped themselves around the television. Her daughter remembers being frightened of them. In places the metal is still faintly yellowed by cigarette smoke and cooking oil.

She called those pieces Living Sculpture, and one of them now belongs to Tate Modern, another to the GAM, Turin’s civic gallery of modern art. The woman who made them is harder to hold. She was the only woman connected with Arte Povera, the Italian movement built from rope, rags, earth and scrap, and for most of her working life critics introduced her first as the wife of one of its leading figures. She left many works undated and untitled, and so little paper behind her that reference sources still disagree about the year she was born. Turin is now marking her centenary with a retrospective spread across three institutions, and it inherits a question she spent her life declining to answer.

What is on record begins in Turin, where she was born on 23 May 1926 and where her father worked for Fiat. In the 1940s she sat as a model for the painter Felice Casorati. Beyond that, the curators of her first American retrospective in 2017 reported that they could find almost nothing about her life before 1960, not even a birth certificate. That year she married Mario Merz, and their daughter, Beatrice, was born.

The kitchen sculptures arrived in 1966, while she was at home with a small child. “I cut these things out and sewed them together, there was a rhythm to it all, as well as a time, a lot of time,” she later said. “Everything was of equal priority, Bea, the things I sewed.” The title nodded to the New York troupe the Living Theatre, and the aluminium soon had a second career as the entrails of a monster in Il mostro verde, an underground short by Tonino De Bernardi and Paolo Menzio.

In 1967, the year the dealer Gian Enzo Sperone showed the sculptures in his Turin gallery, the critic Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera, and his first exhibition under that banner did not include her. She came in through the side door. In October 1968 she took part in the Amalfi event Arte Povera + Azioni Povere alongside Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo and her husband, and her materials shifted from aluminium to knitted copper wire and nylon thread. The Scarpette of 1968 are slippers knitted to the size of her own feet and her daughter’s; at the Rome gallery L’Attico she wore them during an action, as though the sculpture were simply part of what she had on. Another wall piece spelled out the child’s nickname in clumps of nylon mesh, the knitting needles still stuck in it.

Her first solo show at L’Attico, in 1970, came with an action on the beach at Fregene, where she laid rolled-up blankets along the shoreline. That same year she took a flight in a small private plane and treated the trip, recorded in photographs, as a work in its own right. A line from one of her poems about it, the sky is a great space, would later title her American retrospective. In 1975 her second L’Attico exhibition gathered the copper weavings, a bowl of salt, the shoes and the name piece under a sentence that reads like a method: Ad occhi chiusi gli occhi sono straordinariamente aperti, with closed eyes the eyes are extraordinarily open.

From the mid-1970s the work spread into whole rooms, moving between the public space of a gallery and the hidden one of a cellar, and a new subject surfaced: the human face. Small heads in unfired clay, wax and plaster, sometimes touched with gold leaf or bound in copper wire, stayed with her for more than forty years. In 1980 she built E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare, its title taken from the last line of Giacomo Leopardi’s poem L’infinito, first for the Turin gallery Tucci Russo and then for the Venice Biennale. Documenta in Kassel invited her in 1982 and again in 1992, and the Centre Pompidou gave her a solo show in 1994.

The usual story treats her late recognition as a correction, the overlooked wife finally seen. It is more awkward than that. Reviewing her Met Breuer retrospective in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl compared the couple to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and the curator Ian Alteveer told him she was regularly consulted on how Mario’s own exhibitions were installed. The influence ran both ways; the record kept only one direction. She also refused to call herself or her art feminist, to the point of banishing the word from the title of an essay in that catalogue, even as her kitchen, her knitting and her child’s slippers made her the movement’s most obvious case for feminist critics. At Castello di Rivoli the curators have built what they call an augmented retrospective, placing her beside ten women artists of later generations, among them Tacita Dean, Miriam Cahn and Lara Favaretto. It is a generous idea, and it is also the frame, a woman among women, that she spent decades sidestepping.

Recognition, when it came, came from Venice. The 49th Biennale gave her a Special Jury Prize in 2001, and in 2013 the 55th, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, awarded her the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, shared that year with the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig. Widowed in 2003, she was still making work in Turin at ninety when The Sky Is a Great Space, her first major American retrospective, opened at the Met Breuer in New York in January 2017 and then travelled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She died in Turin on 19 July 2019, at 93. Her last solo exhibition, Geometrie sconnesse palpiti geometrici, opened two months later at MASI in Lugano.

Since then the estate, overseen by Beatrice Merz through the Fondazione Merz in Turin, has kept the work travelling; in 2025 Kunstmuseum Bern gave her the largest survey ever mounted in Switzerland. On 29 October 2026 La danza delle ore, The Dance of the Hours, opens in three chapters and runs until 4 April 2027. Castello di Rivoli rebuilds the Leopardi installation of 1980 in its Manica Lunga. The Fondazione Merz follows her process, the way she chose objects and balanced them so they look about to fall. At the GAM the 1966 Living Sculpture goes back on view after a restoration at the conservation centre of La Venaria Reale.

So the aluminium that once crowded a family kitchen, smoke stains and all, returns to a public museum in the city where it was cut. What it argues has not changed: that the hours spent at home, minding a child and cutting metal at the same table, were never a lesser kind of time.

Tags: art, artists, Italian art, Arte Povera, Marisa Merz, Germano Celant