Marisa Merz at 100: Turin Retrospective Refuses to Pin Her Down

A retrospective spanning more than five decades of work by Marisa Merz (1926–2019) has taken over three Turin institutions on the centenary of her birth. Titled "Marisa Merz: La danza delle ore (The Dance of the Hours)," the exhibition fills the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino (GAM), the Fondazione Merz, and the Castello di Rivoli. Even at this scale, the Italian artist remains enigmatic.

That elusiveness was Merz's ethos. Famously camera-shy, she turned her back on Claudio Abate's camera in a photograph taken at her 1975 solo show in Rome: clad in her woven nylon Scarpette (Little Shoes), 1968, she gazes out an open window at the moon. The turn away defines her career. "The artist is already an established role, like the wife, the son. But I don't go along with these roles," she wrote in a 1975 issue of Data Arte magazine.

Who was Marisa Merz?

Merz was the only woman affiliated with Arte Povera (a loose movement named by curator Germano Celant in 1967 that rejected the commodification of art and favored nontraditional, process-based materials). Even within that iconoclastic circle, she stood apart. Her 1967 film The Count shows her in her kitchen sorting beans, inscribing domestic labor into her work. From the 1970s onward she turned to figuration while her peers stayed conceptual.

Her unruly aluminum installations, paraffin pools, and woven forms drew little attention in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognition came late: since the 1990s, major exhibitions of her work have been staged across Europe and the US, and the Venice Biennale awarded her a Golden Lion in 2013.

Why doesn't the show follow a chronology?

The retrospective doesn't run chronologically, largely because it can't. Merz's biography stays shrouded in mystery. Before 1960, the known facts are few: born in Turin to a father employed by Fiat, she studied dance and later modeled in other artists' studios. Even after winning critical attention, she rarely titled or dated her works and struggled to declare them finished.

Her first and best-known installation, The Living Sculpture (1966), encodes that belief: for Merz, completion was concomitant to a kind of death. The work — a tentacular, sewn-aluminum form that once dangled claustrophobically from her home's ceilings — now hangs in glittering fragments at GAM and Castello di Rivoli.

The provisional quality runs through the show. Her knobby clay "Testine (Little Heads)," made from the 1970s to the 2010s, are unfired, sometimes retaining the rough corners from being cut in bricklike masses from a larger block. Her abstracted faces, painted and drawn on paper, wood, and alabaster, appear warped and blurred as if in motion; one untitled, undated graphite physiognomy rearranges itself in whirling, vortex-like eyes.

Curators have also displayed works that may be unfinished, straight from the studio. Notes on hotel stationery and Post-its remain tacked, taped, and clipped onto drawings and paintings — sometimes describing emotions she hoped to capture ("expressive and polished"), sometimes quoting literature (one composition glosses Hölderlin's final poem), sometimes simply logging dimensions. There is a sense, the review notes, that Merz might yet return with needle, pencil, or brush and pick up where she left off.

How do the three venues divide the work?

Each institution takes a distinct angle on the artist:

• GAM Torino emphasizes her superposition of studio and home.
• Fondazione Merz focuses on her material experiments.
• Castello di Rivoli explores her metaphysical engagement with space.

Across all three, Merz's recurring themes — transparency, metamorphosis, and alchemy — surface again and again.

What does the show change for Merz's legacy?

The exhibitions stage encounters between Merz and contemporary women artists whose work shares affinities with hers, including Leonor Antunes, Thea Djordze (Thea Djordjadze), and Miriam Cahn. The point is to show how an idea stays unfixed, persisting and evolving as later generations take it on.

Tacita Dean was commissioned to produce a body of film and photographs in Merz's home and studio. The results include a 16 mm film diptych, Via Milano 13 (2026), capturing scenes from Merz's apartment near Turin's Porta Palazzo market. In slow frames, we see a honeycombed assemblage of cardboard cylinders from toilet-paper and paper-towel rolls; a chorus of "Testine" arranged on the spiraling table in her husband's old studio; and a painted, blue-haired visage with livid red lips fastened to a wall, mirrored upside-down in a glass surface below.

A complementary series of photographs, hung in constellated installations at GAM and Fondazione Merz, opens Merz's private world to view — often capturing works in situ among furniture and family photographs before their displacement into the galleries. The film and images verge on invasion, contravening Merz's injunction against photographic capture, except for one thing: the artist's absence, palpable in Dean's meditative, static shots.

Leaving the exhibitions, the reviewing critic finds Merz's practice even more fugitive than before — and notes the difficulty is not new. Writing on her work for Artforum in 1992, Celant reflected: "The instant it is defined, it flees." Like the artist herself, Merz's works are chimerical, morphing with shifting light, blurring at the edges of the frame, slipping out of sight.