Geometrie sconnesse palpiti geometrici

Published on the occasion of Marisa Merz's exhibition at MASI (Lugano, Switzerland), Marisa Merz: Geometrie sconnesse palpiti geometrici takes its name from a phrase by the artist written on a wall in her studio, and is the result of the precious collaboration between Collezione Giancarlo and Danna Olgiati (Lugano) and Fondazione Merz (Turin). Embracing all the expressive modalities explored by the artist—from drawings to unfired clay sculptures, from copper and nylon weavings to objects transmuted into wax— and with texts by Ester Coen, Douglas Fogle, and Beatrice Merz, the book follows and highlights the pivotal theme that recurs in the artist's work: her exploration of the face and the figure in general. Traces of a complex, philosophical thought, they're the products of an almost obsessively cadenced superimposition of visual marks and materials.

“With a simple gestures, Marisa draws a space, marks a place, alludes to its transparency, discovers the direction, and etches her passage into the very short breath of a vacuum that she fills with incommensurable meaning. A shoe, a net whose mesh captures the time and the moment, the material present in the fragment of impulses of the living, in the pattern of a notion of lightness and strenght.”—Ester Coen