Early Works
November 10 — December 17, 2016
New York: 24th Street
Gladstone, in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, is pleased to present an exhibition of historic early works by Mario Merz. A leading member of Italy’s Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, Merz created paintings, sculptures, and installations with an aim to oppose a monolithic culture and to celebrate perplexity. This goal manifested itself in the artist’s deviation from the mass-media iconography popularized by Pop Art, the mythic emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, and the machismo detachment of Minimalism. Instead, Merz and his Arte Povera contemporaries – such as Alighiero e Boetti, Luciano Fabro, and Jannis Kounellis, among others – employed simple, everyday materials and perceptive references to nature in order to ground their art in a relatable existential ambiguity.
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About
Mario Merz was born in 1925 and died in 2003 in Milan, Italy. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; and the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel, Germany. Merz was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Welhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg, Germany; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is included in many prominent public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, among many others. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.
More on Mario Merz
