Three Turin Museums Join to Honour Marisa Merz on Her Centenary

Three major museums in Turin, Italy, are presenting a joint retrospective of Marisa Merz, the Italian artist who was born in 1926 and died in 2019. The show, titled "Marisa Merz: La danza delle ore" (The Dance of the Hours), marks the centenary of her birth. ArtNews reported on the exhibition, which covers more than five decades of her work.

Merz was the only woman linked to Arte Povera, a movement of Italian artists who worked in the 1960s with everyday and unconventional materials. The name was given in 1967 by the curator Germano Celant. Her work was recognised at the Venice Biennale, one of the world's oldest international art festivals, which gave her a Golden Lion in 2013. The Golden Lion is the festival's top prize.

The retrospective is split across three venues, and each one takes a different angle. At the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino, known as GAM, the focus is on the way Merz's studio and her home ran into each other in her life and work. The Fondazione Merz, a centre for contemporary art founded in 2005 and named after the artist Mario Merz, looks at her experiments with materials. The Castello di Rivoli, a contemporary art museum housed in a castle just outside Turin, explores her interest in space and the non-physical.

Merz was born in Turin, the city in the north-west of Italy where car maker Fiat is based. Her father worked for the company. She studied dance before she began modelling in other artists' studios, a period that put her close to the making of art long before she began to exhibit her own.

Her first major installation, The Living Sculpture, dates to 1966. It is still one of her best-known works, and it is one of the reasons the Turin shows begin with the early years.

For visitors, the practical point is that the retrospective is not in one building. Anyone who wants the full picture will need to visit GAM, the Fondazione Merz and the Castello di Rivoli, each of which is a separate stop in the city.

The show arrives as the centenary of Merz's birth draws attention to a body of work that spans painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Exhibitions of this kind bring together loans from collections and artists' estates, and they give the public a chance to see how one career developed over half a century.