The exhibition’s centerpiece is Spostamenti della Terra e della Luna su un Asse (“Movements of the Earth and the Moon on an Axis”), 2003, a three-domed installation and the final igloo he made. Merz began constructing igloos in 1968 using a variety of materials, and this particular one combines many of these earthen and industrial objects – metal rods, neon, clamps, clay, glass and stone – in its tripartite structure. Merz’s igloos are among his most iconic works, providing a free-standing and independent form to affect material energies, however impermanent or precarious they may be.

“For him it is the act of building, not the finished structure that is meaningful. Building is a journey through the territory he works in, so his process is determined by the conditions he finds, his materials – whether man-made or natural – depend upon what is locally available,” wrote curator Germano Celant.

The artist’s interest in light and energy found its most enduring expression in his use of neon tubes. Merz employed neon lights on materials such as bottles, synthesizing the industrial qualities of the tube with the chemical and its immaterial radiance. In Igloo con vortice (“Igloo with Vortex”), 1981, on public view for the first time since his 1989 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Merz placed a blue neon light amidst a swath of bundled brushwood leaning against a mixed media rendering of a cone and dome.

“The neon is experienced as an energetic flux or spear of light that passes through the object, thus destroying the idea of the solidity of the object,” wrote
Celant. “Punctured by the neon, the object becomes annulled as an icon but it is redefined as material; the neon abandons its own physicality and becomes light.”

The exhibition includes sculptures and works on paper that express some of his most enduring motifs. Merz’s interest in art emerged during his imprisonment in 1945, while detained for anti-Fascist activities he began regularly drawing spiraling forms without lifting his pen from the page. These activities combined with his reaction against the Italian state informed his desire to defy the status quo of art through a turn toward simpler materials and imagery.

The works on paper, although drawn from various points in his life, speak to Merz’s sustained investment in the ideas that inspired his art, depicting spirals as well as organic form with a range of materials and objects such as raincoats, which became a hallmark of many of his mixed media and two-dimensional works. These works, and the exhibition as a whole, attest to his pursuit of a distinctive and avant garde project steeped in new ways of making art.

Merz said, “I think that everything has already been destroyed and, as far as I’m concerned, I want to put things right again, really clean things out.”