The Reina Sofia Museum is organising a retrospective that dips into some of this Italian artist's best-known creations. An approach to an art suspended in a kind of prehistoric limbo that drinks directly from 'povera' art.

Merz's artistic practice incorporates several fundamental traits that contemporary art critic Germano Celant identified with this current: a frontal opposition to the capitalist society of consumption and the use of organic materials such as clay, branches, wax or charcoal.

Some of the recurrent associations in the artist's pre-modern imaginary emerge from their use: fire, lightning and arrow; figures with mythical and geological meanings: the igloo, the table, the spiral or the river; or ancestral animals: the rhinoceros or the crocodile.

In this sense, the search for the mythical distinguishes Merz's work, since his archaism has nothing to do with the melancholic longing of the past, but with an incisive critique of industrial and consumerist modernity.

A member of the anti-fascist resistance group, Merz was imprisoned for his activism in 1945, when he began to resort to precarious materials to produce his works. He aesthetically developed his political and social concerns arising in the heat of May '68: criticism of capitalism and post-industrial society, ideological and hegemonic exclusion in the colonial system or autonomism are some of the themes of his works.

Image credit:

Mario Merz. Igloo [Tenda di Gheddafi], 1968-1981. Tubos de hierro, acrílico sobre lienzo de yute. 250 x 500 cm. Castello di Rivoli Museo D'Arte