This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Todestriebe by MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni) held at Fondazione Merz from 3rd October 2014 to 11th January 2015. “The mantis waiting in the shadows is a still taken from the latest video by the Masbedo, entitled Todestriebe, which means death wish, a concept identified by Freud as an unavoidable aspect of the human unconscious, which aspires to the enjoyment rather than to one’s well-being. […] Todestriebe is also the title of the exhibition that Iacopo Bedogni and Nicolò Massazza are presenting at the Fondazione Merz, because it is an instinct that permeates every work in their exhibition project. Conflict, dramatic relationships, loneliness all appearing together in an atmosphere of aggression and passiveness. It seems that life itself is cannibal by definition, like a kind of mantis.

The catalogue was published on the occasion of the Voglio fare subito una mostra exhibition featuring Elisabetta Benassi at the Fondazione Merz running from 15 May 2012 to 8 September 2013.
“The exhibition is divided into different moments, starting with the large installation of the fishing boat ’beached’ in the rooms of the Fondazione with a car hanging from its stern (Mareo Merz, 2013). Months earlier, a newspaper report contained the image of a boat whose swollen nets contained another boat. The artist mentally appropriated this surreal vision, processed it and returned it, rich in new content. Elisabetta Benassi’s research always leads to the discovery of what time has allowed to sediment in things: not only the visible traces of the processes of transformation of matter, but the soul of things given to them by those who have owned them or only lived in them for brief periods, imbuing them with moods, laughter, sleep and exhausting vigils. ”. (Maria Centonze)

The book reproduces the photographic documentation of the exhibition and is enriched with texts by Maria Centonze, Beatrice Merz, Luca Lo Pinto and Olaf Nicolai.

The catalogue is published on the occasion of Abbiamo amato tanto la rivoluzione (‘We loved it so much the revolution’) exhibition by Alfredo Jaar held at Fondazione Merz from 5^th November 2013 to 2^nd February 2014. “Alfredo Jaar has chosen the reflection (in both senses of the word) of history from the 1960s and ‘70s. He travels some way with Mario Merz, builds a picture gallery and invites the works of some artists with whom he feels some kinship in this adventure, and illuminates memory so that it A deliberate act of will by the artist, with an invitation to modify our perception of things. The luminosity of the words written in neon indicates the fragile border between truth, the non-linear progress of thought and the need to prepare oneself to cross over”. (Claudia Gioia)

This catalogue photographically documents the exhibition and thus offers vivid insight into artist’s work, whose interior pathway is told in words by the exhibition’s curator Claudia Gioia, accompanying texts by Beatrice Merz, a poem by Nanni Balestrini and an interview by Luigi Fassi.

This DVD reintroduces the essential 2000 VHS video documentary Arte Povera by Sergio Ariotti and Beatrice Merz, a complete, chronological overview of the radical – and defiantly unglamorous–Italian “poor art” movement that arose in the late 1960s to contest the separation of art and everyday life. It presents ample archival material from all the significant group exhibitions – from the three-day event Arte Povera + Azioni Povere at Amalfi of 1968 to the Venice Biennale of 1997 – along with footage of recent solo exhibitions and interview clips with founding member and art historian Germano Celant, and a range of other artists, critics and gallery directors. Arte Povera presents the movement in all its complexity, and includes such participants as Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio.

The book, published on the occasion of Simon Starling’s exhibition The Inaccessible Poem at Fondazione Merz from 29 October 2011 to 15 January 2012, goes beyond the concept of a catalogue to become a sort of notebook, a place of relations between distant spheres and other, perhaps inaccessible, ones.

In the exhibition event in which the British artist took on the role of curator, Starling established a dialogue between the subjects that make up the exhibition, in perfect coherence with what he theorises, namely the need to create “constellations of ideas and to fix them in a reciprocal orbit”. There were therefore no works by just one artist, but a collection of works from totally different experiences, whose relationship lies precisely in the empirical way of approaching science and knowledge, of suggesting poetic deviations or ironic digressions: unaltered visions of a world that continues to show intelligence and offer perspectives. The exhibition project he conceived combined some of his works with works by Mario Merz, Sture Johannesson, James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, Faivovich & Goldberg.

The book is accompanied by texts by Maria Centonze, Guillermo Faivovich, Nicolas Goldberg, Jacob Lillemose, Hernan Pruden and Simon Starling with works by Faivovich & Goldberg, Sture Johannesson, Mario Merz, James Nasmyth, James Carpenter and Simon Starling.

This volume collects the documentation of the solo exhibition that the Fondazione Merz dedicated to Kara Walker, curated by Olga Gambari, from 25 March to 3 July 2011. The exhibition project included a review of films – a field of expression to which the artist is strongly attached – an international conference on the political and psychological dimension of racial stereotypes and a workshop with students from the Accademia Albertina and the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Turin. In addition, the participation of journalist and writer Rebecca Walker enriched the debate on the concepts of race, class, culture and gender. Kara Walker, confronting the post-industrial space of the Foundation, presented cut papers in free evolution on the walls, a video-installation, drawings, collages and tempera paintings.

The project that involves the artist and that the book illustrates with a vast photographic and textual apparatus, is centred on the mythical memory that takes shape in her work, a memory in constant metamorphosis in which the biographical dimension is placed in connection with collective experience. A historical event such as the birth of the Afro-American community in the United States, linked to centuries of slavery and the subsequent difficult racial integration, becomes a material on which Kara Walker can draw for her figurative stories, playing on shadows and silhouettes. Her black silhouettes move in a visionary and metaphorical land, between day/night and light/dark. Fiercely realistic stories, allegories of black humour are represented in installations, videos, stage sets, puppets, kinetic shadows, wall drawings, collages on various supports, from wall to canvas. But also drawings, tempera, miniatures and large dimensions for dynamic stories that hover in a dimension where the grotesque verges on the dramatic. Kara Walker’s stories become myths, fairy tales, and although they have precise roots, they become universal narratives.