Living Sculpture

In the late 1960s the term Arte Povera was coined to describe the radical style of a group of Italian artists who began to engage everyday materials. Marisa Merz was included in the important Arte Povera + Azioni Povere exhibition in 1968 as one of the movement’s leading practitioners. She spent the majority of her career, however, retreating from the public sphere, creating works in intimate settings such as her home. Merz has in fact stated, “There has never been any division between my life and my work.” This three-part work belongs to the larger series Untitled (Living Sculptures), begun in 1965. These extraordinary objects, crafted from thin folds of pliant, layered sheet metal, were made to hang from the ceiling of her Turin apartment. Her living and working spaces became, to varying degrees, a forest, a hive, a cave, and a womb. Merz’s process turned simple industrial materials into fluid, organic forms. Removed from any social or narrative context, her abstract, formal inventions operate within their own temporal logic, reflecting the artist’s belief in the enduring effect of each artwork beyond its material realization and the constraints of time and place.