The retrospective exhibition dedicated to Mario Merz (Milan, 1925-2003) explores the provenance of a body of work suspended in a kind of pre-historic time, at odds with the discourse of modern history. This anachronistic perspective, apparent in the choice of materials and iconography, stems from the ideological and committed stance of an artist and his relation to the political and intellectual climate in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, in addition to his rejection of pervasive capitalism and the American way of life after the Second World War.

Merz’s practice, linked to Arte Povera, incorporates different key characteristics: its opposition to the post-industrial society of consumerism, and a conscious use of organic materials such as clay, branches, wax and coal that have given rise to the recurring associations in the pre-modern imagery of the artist, for instance fire, lightning bolts and arrows; figures with mythical and geological meanings – the igloo, the table, the spiral, the river; or ancestral animals like the rhinoceros and the crocodile. These motifs, coupled with the idea of the nomad, permeate the artist’s poetics, vindicating lifestyles in consonance with nature that resist the predatory schemes of capitalist modernity, making of his work a sharp critique of industrial and consumerist modernity.    

Very early in his career, Merz aesthetically explored his political and social concerns, particularly in works like Igloo di Giap and Che fare?, which stemmed from the fervour of May ’68 and from political and philosophical ideas that refashioned the classical concept of Marxism regarding the role of the intellectual as a revolutionary subject. 

Palacio de Velázquez 

Parque del Retiro, Paseo Venezuela, 2, 28001 Madrid