Marisa Merz, who has died aged 93, was the only female artist associated with arte povera, the late-1960s Italian movement that favoured everyday, throwaway materials over traditional media such as oil paint and marble. Her sculptures of rolled-up blankets, held together with copper wire and tape, and abandoned on the beach, featured alongside those of Jannis Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto and her husband, Mario Merz, in the 1968 landmark exhibition Arte Povera + Azioni Povere on the southern Amalfi coast. A series of tiny threaded shoes, the first of many references to her daughter to be found in Merz’s work, were also left out on the sand, perilously close to the incoming tide.
The show was curated by Germano Celant, who had fomented his manifesto, Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War, a year prior in the kitchen of the Merzes’ grand Turin apartment. The phrase “poor art” did not refer to the works’ value but rather the artists’ commitment, in Celant’s words, to “contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present”, as opposed to the commercial demands of the art market. While Mario is namechecked in the text, Marisa is not mentioned. In 1968 she released her own statement, one of the rare occasions she made any public comment: “I’m not interested in power or in career; only myself and the world interest me. I can do little, very little. I am battling against malice and competition. I cannot escape the reality I see.”
The same kitchen had housed the first of what she termed her “living sculptures”, sheets of aluminium twisted and stapled into tubes and hung from the ceiling. Initially occupying a space above the cooker, they eventually colonised the entire residence, creeping behind the television and over the dining table. “The house was completely invaded,” recalled the film-maker Tonino De Bernardi.
The living sculptures had formed Merz’s debut solo show in June 1967 at the Enzo Sperone gallery and that December at the Piper Pluri Club, a Turin disco that had opened the year before to host radical artistic happenings, and reappeared throughout her career. They doubled as scenery in Il Mostre Verde (1967), a short film made by De Bernardi, which was screened at Pistoletto’s studio. Pistoletto lived in the same block as Marisa and Mario, as did their fellow arte povera artist Giuseppe Penone. Yet as much as Marisa was part of an experimental scene, her art was integrally entangled with motherhood and her home. “There was Beatrice, still very little,” she wrote of her daughter in 1975. “She’d ask me things, I’d get up and I’d do them. Everything was on the same level, Bea and the things I was sewing.” A 1968 work, spelling out her daughter’s name in woven nylon and wire, has become one of Merz’s best known, belying its simplicity; Altalena per Bea of the same year, an elegant swing constructed in dark wood, doubled as a plaything for the child.
The artist refused to formally name or date her works. Artmaking, she claimed, operated “beyond time”. Nor was it always clear what was her labour and what was her husband’s; both worked on each other’s art in neighbouring rooms. Tommaso Trini, an Italian critic and a longtime champion of the artist, wrote in 1975 that “Marisa divided herself into Marisa and Mario. Mario divided himself in Mario and Marisa. An extraordinary community, in which identification has resisted the individualism that separates the names.”
Likewise, she always refused to divulge any details of her life prior to 1960, the year she married Mario. She was born in Turin, her father a Fiat car factory worker. As a teenager she studied classical ballet and, for a period, modelled for Felice Casorati, the Torinese figurative painter. Having started to move in Turin’s artistic circles, she met and married Mario, who, after Marisa became pregnant the same year, suggested the child be born in Switzerland, where he had ancestry. The couple set out by train for Zurich, only to disembark on a whim at the small village of Frutigen in the Alps, where they would settle for three years. By the time they returned to Italy, the couple had decided they were artists.
At the 1972 Venice Biennale they exhibited together, the year Celant retired the term he coined. The artists, however, remained committed to its low-fi ethos. Two years later Marisa returned to show a wall of small copper mesh sculptures under her own name. In 1977 she had a solo exhibition at Galleria Salvatore Ala in Milan, which featured knitting needles, dying flowers, bowls and fruit. These allusions to the domestic environment were embraced by the burgeoning feminist art movement involving contemporaries such as Carol Rama and Carla Accardi, however Merz herself refused to comment.
In 1982 she began to make unfired clay heads, deformed but never monstrous, a body of work that proliferated for more than a decade. She exhibited again at the Venice Biennale in 1986, and Documenta in Kassel in 1992. Two years later Merz had her first US show at Barbara Gladstone, a gallery at which she would exhibit regularly over the following two decades. Her first of many retrospectives was in 1995, at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland, culminating in a 2017 survey that toured the US, Portugal and Austria.
After Mario died in 2003, Marisa left his studio untouched. She continued to make art into her 90s, keeping to a strict routine each day, largely refusing guests, but producing large drawings of angels and Madonnas, clambering up on to a step ladder to reach the top of the two-metre sheets of paper.
Merz was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2013, the year of her solo show at the Serpentine gallery in London.
She is survived by Beatrice.
• Marisa Merz, artist, born 23 May 1926; died 19 July 2019
