Marisa Merz at The MET Breuer By Barry Kostrinsky

Marisa Merz at The MET Breuer
By Barry Kostrinsky

Marisa Merz at the Metropolitan Museum's still new Breuer location on Madison and 75th reveals itself when elevator doors open on the second floor to sculptures from 1967 as the MET Opera hopes to when the curtain rises at Lincoln Center. This is a bravo moment for the curators and the artist. Marisa now in her 90's is so much more than the wife of Mario Merz and the only female member of the Art Povera clan and is both enigmatic and a deep and powerful artist.

History is lost as dust passes. A lack of some dating and documentation does not help the curators in this show but the overall scope and feel reveal a brilliant mind and one in a string of several important female artist who have been recently revealed to the public and historians replacing past transgression by overlooked missed visions of the male driven western historical gaze.

The range of expression from minimal balanced Mondrian like coordinated placements of knitted copper squares curved on the sides (very calculus of her)- compared with the original cluttered, stuck in and real setting of the metal living sculptures in the kitchen is impressive and wide and much like the accomplishment of a .300 hitter from both sides of the plate in baseball. Marisa's studio was the kitchen and the living room and she broke ground exploring the space much as Schwitters would in his oddly and coincidentally termed Merz constructions.

We all know of Frida Kahlo these days, but you will soon be hearing more of Jay Defeo, whose exhibit at the Breuer when it was still a Whitney was monumental. Nikki De Saint Phalle is a name coming to history books soon as a show mounts at the Tate in London and will travel to the US. Indeed this is the first full US showing of Marisa's work and both the Hammer Museum from LA made this happen with the efforts of Marisa's daughter and the Merz foundation. This is an example of museums linking from necessity and to benefit each other and a model for other museums and efforts to stave off extinction in the art unfriendly environment the new US administration will likely foster.

Marisa's work incorporates found objects and materials including copper wire weaved together, knitting needles, hair, hemp, fragile greenware ceramics, spray paint, miscellaneous metals, wax, nails, graphite and more. Her formal language uses line, geometry and more than a hint of Fibonacci and when focused on the figure mostly implores the face in an almost neolithic or Easter Island kind of way.

The movement of the works brings to mind the futurist and Balla in particular. Sweeping curves create the motion with repetition in an organic way they feel as if they are gridded on a snails spiral- the growth function found often in nature. The work seems pure, real and honest. Her force and flow is unmistakable and she has imprinted herself on these mundane objects.

Marisa traveled and visited museums often. Her work may have been informed by African art and more. Hard to tell where this outsider saw art inside hallowed halls that influenced her. What was her fathers influence on her as an auto worker with Fiat and the availability or materials he may have tinkered with at home? It is hard to say but for sure she is exploring everyman materials or better said everywoman materials. Knitting, so hot today and for the last 10 years draws back to a time when we hand made our clothes and hints at the undervalued slave labor of the at home woman force in a culture.

At times her forms have the feel of Yoyai Kusama, another great woman artists finally getting her due ignited by the recent retrospective at the Breuer building. I even felt a touch of Jeff Koons in some of the work though indeed only if he had smoothed and finished the surfaces. Tony Feher's debt and relationship either tangible or just shared through the zeitgeist is obvious. My bet is this exhibit makes many end of year best of 2017 lists, though indeed it will have recency bias working against it in December. The MET is on a roll at the Breuer, go see it and experience a first look for many at this brilliant, powerful, complex and yet very simple and real artist.

http://www.metmuseum.org/visit/met-breuer

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/marisa-merz