This dossier is published on the occasion of the exhibition Mario Merz. La natura è l’equilibrio (Nature is equilibium) held at the Fondazione Merz from 4th July to 18th september 2016. After the Fondazione’s inaugural exhibition in 2005, and after three themed exhibitions about the drawings in 2007, about the paintings in 2010, and about his links with architectural design in 2011, and following a number of external collaborations, the Fondazione is now devoting an entire exhibition to present a careful selection of works by Mario Merz that are closely related to the theme of nature. This is a theme that is certainly not unusual for the artist who, with his watchful eyes, never overlooked the subject, either in private life or in his artistic development that saw him constantly asking questions.

An extreme desire, therefore, to observe the fundamental laws that govern the universe more closely because living on earth means observing and participating in its evolution.

The exhibition foresees the display of works from the Merz collection, including some not shown for many years. The selection will include paintings, installations and drawings, and each work has a selected text alongside by Mario Merz.

The idea is to focus the exhibition with a poetic tale of the earth as creator of life rather than exclusively on the concepts related to the work itself. As though it were a reading of forms, figures and words in an attempt to reorganise the pairing between culture and nature.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Society, you’re a crazy breed by Botto&Bruno held at Fondazione Merz from 9th March to 19th June 2016. “The exhibition in the spaces of the Fondazione Merz is the new stage of an artistic journey that starts as always with the history of the place, drawing the infinite possibilities enclosed in it. It is a place subjected to radical changes that time and man have impressed on it either deliberately or through neglect, but which continues to be a container of life and energy. Within this context, the reading of the new world brings with it a thousand fragments of various objects, both recognisable and unrecognisable, which daily appear before our eyes like the ruins of a past that appears to us all the more a lost eden the more time passes. The photographs pervade the exhibition space to the point of creating a new dimension, like a city of the future in which the remains of a civilisation mingle with the present, defining new possibilities of life.

Botto&Bruno have produced an accurate sounding, a powerful lens open and responsive to every detail, as though with a wish to give back to these abandoned objects, these violated places the dignity impressed on them when they were born”. (Maria Centonze)

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition DOPO by Christian Boltanski held at Fondazione Merz from 3rd November 2015 to 31th January 2016. “Christian Boltanski lays claim to his being an artist of the twentieth century, and indeed all his work takes us into the heart of the contemporary scene. But not the updated and temporary one but the real one made of choices and events that change the meaning of individual anonymous lives that become choral and paradigmatic. It is another way to tell the story that we are. Not the impressive and official one, never that of the winners but the story of all of us, with things desired and also suffered. With minimal language and one not prone to celebration he has succeeded in talking about everything without remaining anchored to anything”. (Claudia Gioia)

This book reproduces the photographic documentation of the exhibition and it is enriched by texts by Claudia Gioia (exhibition curator), Massimo Donà (philosopher), Beatrice Merz.

Christian Boltanski (1944-2021), French painter, sculptor, photographer and filmmaker, was born in Paris. He began to make his way in the art world with painting when he was only thirteen years old, towards the end of the 1950s. In the 1960s, he began to develop a 'personal ethnology' marked by the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Harald Szeemann, among others. At the same time, drawing on museology, Boltanski exhibited inventories of objects of anonymous owners (photos, clothing, bells, flowers...) creating an extraordinary hybrid between absence and presence, autobiography and collective imagination.

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.