How Does an Artist Know When She’s Done? A Major Marisa Merz Retrospective Turns the Question on Its Head

Italian artist Marisa Merz (1926–2019) was famously camera-shy. In rare snapshots, such as a captivating photograph taken by Claudio Abate at her 1975 solo show in Rome, she would retreat from the camera’s gaze. Before Abate’s camera, Merz appears clad in her woven nylon Scarpette (Little Shoes), 1968, her back to him as she gazes out an open window at the moon.

The turn away is emblematic of Merz’s artistic ethos writ large. As she once wrote, in a 1975 issue of Data Arte magazine, “The artist is already an established role, like the wife, the son. But I don’t go along with these roles.”

Merz was the only woman affiliated with Arte Povera, a loose movement christened in 1967 by curator Germano Celant that rejected the commodification of art and celebrated presence and materiality through nontraditional media and process-based practices. Even within this iconoclast milieu, she remained an outlier, not only for her inscription of domestic labor into her work—in her 1967 film The Count, she is seen in her kitchen sorting beans—but also for her use of figuration from the 1970s onward. Her unruly aluminum installations, paraffin pools, and woven forms were overlooked in the 1960s and 1970s, but she has gained wider recognition in recent years. Since the 1990s, major exhibitions of her work have been staged across Europe and the US, and in 2013, the Venice Biennale honored her with a Golden Lion.

Still, Merz remains evasive even as she enters the spotlight. A sprawling and polyphonic retrospective titled “Marisa Merz: La danza delle ore (The Dance of the Hours)” has taken over three Turin institutions on the centenary of her birth. Yet despite its exhaustive review of more than five decades of her work, she remains enigmatic. The Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Torino (GAM) emphasizes her superposition of studio and home; the Fondazione Merz focuses on her material experiments; and the Castello di Rivoli explores her metaphysical engagement with space. All the while, Merz’s elusive central themes—transparency, metamorphosis, and alchemy—recur throughout.

True to the retrospective’s title, the suite of exhibitions doesn’t follow a chronological itinerary, if only because to do so is nearly impossible. Her biography remains shrouded in mystery. These are the known facts of her life before 1960: Born in Turin to a father employed by Fiat, she studied dance and later modeled in other artists’ studios. Even after garnering critical attention, she rarely titled or dated her compositions and struggled to lay them to rest. The title of her first and best-known installation, The Living Sculpture (1966), says it all, encoding her belief that completion is concomitant to a kind of death.

This unsettled attitude manifests in a provisional quality that prevails across the works on view. The Living Sculpture is a tentacular, sewn-aluminum work that originally dangled claustrophobically from the ceilings of her home and now hangs in glittering fragments at GAM and Castello di Rivoli. Her series of knobby clay “Testine (Little Heads),” made from the 1970s to the 2010s, are unfired and sometimes retain the rough corners with which they were cut in bricklike masses from a larger block of clay. Her abstracted faces, painted and drawn on paper, wood, and alabaster, are warped and blurred as if in motion; one untitled and undated graphite physiognomy rearranges itself in whirling lines of vortex-like eyes.

Merz, like her Arte Povera peers, was frustrated by fixity and drawn to materials that morph across time. Perhaps appropriately, the curators have displayed works that may be unfinished and come straight from the studio; whether she planned to continue them will never be known. Notes on hotel stationery and Post-its remain tacked, taped, and clipped directly onto her drawings and paintings, variably describing the emotions she hoped to capture (for example, “expressive and polished”), quoting from literature (one composition glosses Hölderlin’s final poem), or simply logging dimensions. There is a sense that Merz might yet return with needle, pencil, or brush and pick up where she left off.

As if to show how an idea remains unfixed, persisting and evolving as later generations take it on, the exhibitions stage encounters between Merz and contemporary women artists—including Leonor Antunes, Thea Djordjadze, and Miriam Cahn—whose work shares affinities with hers. 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 rolls of toilet paper and paper towels; a chorus of “Testine” arranged on the spiraling table in her husband’s old studio; a painted, blue-haired visage with livid red lips fastened on a wall, its double mirrored upside-down in a glass surface below. Hung in constellated installations at GAM and Fondazione Merz, a complementary series of photographs likewise opens Merz’s private world to our curious eyes, often capturing works in situ among furniture and family photographs before their displacement to the exhibitions’ airy galleries. The film and images verge on invasion, contravening Merz’s injunction against photographic capture—except, of course, for the fact of the artist’s absence, palpable in Dean’s meditative, static shots.

Leaving this suite of exhibitions, I find Merz’s practice is even more fugitive than before. I am not the first critic to encounter this difficulty. 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 the shifting light, blurring at the edges of the frame, slipping out of sight.