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Image
Courtesy Walker Art Center
Rights
Copyright retained by the artist

Copyright

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Title
Untitled
Artist
Mario Merz
Date
1996-1997
Dimensions
overall installed 240 × 480 inches
Materials
neon tubing
Location
On view at the Walker Art Center, Cowles Conservatory, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Object Details

Type
Sculpture
Accession Number
1996.178
Style
Arte Povera
Printer
N.A.
Credit Line
Anonymous gift from three local residents with appreciation for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and contemporary art, 1996
Object Copyright
Copyright retained by the artist

artwork entry Mario Merz, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, 1998

Mario Merz is a leading artist of Arte Povera, a movement that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s among a group of artists dedicated to using the materials of everyday life and the natural world in their work. Igloos (made of such materials as glass, slate, or wax), spirals, the nature-related mathematical formula known as the Fibonacci sequence, and the elemental gas neon are recurring elements in Merz’s art, often appearing in combination with one another. Political or literary references in neon script span the domes of his glass igloos, while the Fibonacci numbers (again in neon) spiral up the stairways of museums, as they did here at the Walker Art Center during his first American show in 1972. In the untitled piece the artist created for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, the words città irreale (“unreal city,” a phrase from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land) appear in spiralling red neon script on the side of the Cowles Conservatory, disappearing into the glass structure when the piece is unlit.

Jenkins, Janet, ed. Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1998, no. 4.

© 1998 Walker Art Center

object label Mario Merz, Untitled (1996-1997), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997. , 1998

Mario Merz is a senior artist of the postwar Italian movement known as Arte Povera. The phrase arte povera literally means “poor art” and was coined in 1967 to describe the work being created by a loose-knit group of artists residing primarily in Milan, Rome, and Turin. These artists were determined to question the boundaries between traditional artistic practices (painting and sculpture) through the use of nontraditional materials (i.e., lead, glass, vegetation, newspaper, fabric) in an effort to align their work more closely to the worlds of science and nature.

In 1972, Mario Merz had his first American museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center. Twenty-five years later, in July 1997, his untitled commission was installed on the roof of the Conservatory. Constructed of clear glass and infused with pure red neon gas, the work reads citta irreale (unreal city), which is a recurring phrase in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Merz uses citta irreale as a metaphor for the world of art as a “city of ideas.” The neon is intended to function like a beacon inviting those rushing to and fro in the real city (outside the limits of the Garden) to pause for a moment and perhaps enter the unreal city where reflection, contemplation, and renewal of the spirit are the goals.

Label text for Mario Merz, Untitled (1996-1997), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997.

Copyright 1998 Walker Art Center

object label Mario Merz, Citta Irreale (1996-1997) , 1998

“Here I sit and see the tips of the church spires and the tips of the trees, I see the drops of water on the window, I hear the tram rattling past. This is my world, this is what occupies me all day.”–Mario Merz

Label text for Mario Merz, Citta Irreale (1996-1997), from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1998.

Copyright 1998 Walker Art Center