Marisa Merz At 100: Major Retrospective To Span Three Italian Museums

A major retrospective devoted to Marisa Merz (1926–2019) will unfold across three institutions in and around Turin next year, offering an unusually broad view of the artist who brought a singular, quietly radical voice to Arte Povera. Titled“Marisa Merz – The Dance of the Hours,” the project will be shared by the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM), Fondazione Merz, and the Castello di Rivoli, with each venue focusing on a different facet of her practice.

The scale is notable not only for its geography but for its ambition. Press materials describe the exhibition as one that is unlikely to be repeated in terms of comprehensiveness and depth. Visitors will see never-before-seen works alongside key pieces from earlier presentations, including material from Merz's 2017 U.S. retrospective,“The Sky Is A Great Space.”

Merz, the only woman in Italy's Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, began making her aluminum“Living Sculptures” in 1966. Her first solo exhibition followed in 1967 at Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery in Turin. Over the decades, she worked in metal, fabric, wax, and paint, building an art of deliberate ambiguity that held process, motherhood, and material transformation in uneasy but productive balance.

The Castello di Rivoli section, organized by Francesco Manacorda and Marianna Vecellio, will center on“E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare” (1980), an immersive work first shown in a special exhibition of Italian modern art at the 39th Venice Biennale, at the invitation of Harald Szeeman. Their presentation will also trace Merz's interest in the metaphysical dimensions of space and point to artists carrying aspects of her legacy today, including Miriam Cahn and Micol Assaël.

At Fondazione Merz, Beatrice Merz will work with Sébastien Delot of Musée Picasso Paris on a selection organized around process and transformation. GAM, meanwhile, will present a show developed by Chiara Bertola and Chiara Parisi that considers the collision of art and life through the lens of Merz's home-studio-workshop.

All three exhibitions will be accompanied by a single catalog, which will debut at a conference devoted to the artist. The date has not yet been announced, but the project already signals a rare institutional effort to map Merz's work across generations, materials, and sites.

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