Webs of delicate copper wire coalesce into geometric forms, faces materialize through smoky charcoal shadows, and eyes peer out from beneath Byzantine veils of gold. Strong or delicate, finished or unfinished, ancient or contemporary, the art of Marisa Merz is intensely dialogical. Viewing her works entails entering into a conversation with them. Meanings, and our understandings, deepen through a process of engagement with the seemingly opposed forces, states, or materials she harnesses in each work. We explore the edges of a gestural drawing to discover traces of a compositional scaffolding, we interrogate a block of wax to understand if it is liquid or solid, and we seek a figure emerging from a lump of unfired clay. The persistently enigmatic qualities of her works have frequently been understood as a feminist strategy, a way to side-step an aesthetic language that was inaccessible to, or at least ill-fitting for, women in mid-century Italy. Others have argued that such a lens limits our ability to understand her contributions to the broader history of sculpture, of postwar figuration, and of conceptual art. Understanding her works as invitations to dialogue–to investigate materials, sensations, and imagery–allows us to see the way Merz questioned the traditional role of the artist in ways that aligned with the most radical perspectives of her (male) Arte Povera colleagues, and, simultaneously, recast artistic identity in her own (female) image.