Marisa Merz passed away in 2019. The upcoming exhibition dedicated to her, at LAM in Lille in the spring of 2024, will therefore be the first to be conceived without the artist and to be based exclusively on archival research, testimonies, investigations into her living and working spaces. The only woman in the Arte Povera group, in which she held a uniquely personal and withdrawn position, Marisa Merz is the author of works that transcend the space-time of the private dimension to assert themselves as acts of concentration that reveal the underlying structure of materials, forms, human emotions… “With closed eyes, the eyes are extraordinarily open,” said the artist, whose practice consists of weaving patterns, performing the act of marking and tracing, caressing and shaping surfaces that are precarious and intense, arranged in timeless sequences of touches, grazes, hints. Works without classifications, continually reworked over the years and contiguous to the flow of experience. Even their titles “come and go,” works of perhaps (or “almost” as Hans Ulrich Obrist wrote), ephemeral claims of a principle of indeterminacy that allows us to reopen our eyes and better embrace what exists around and within us, seeking expression.

Speakers:  Sebastien Delot (Co-curator of the exhibition and Director of Collections, Musée Picasso, Paris, and former Director of LAM-Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary, and Outsider Art) and Andrea Viliani (Co-curator of the exhibition and Director of the Museo delle Civiltà, Roma)

Language: Italian

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photo credits: Marisa Merz, L’Attico, Roma, 1969