Artlyst has visited Pirelli HangarBicocca Milan, which is currently presenting the iconic igloos of the late Mario Merz – the highly influential figure of Arte Povera, who is considered to be one of the most important post-war Italian artists.
![Mario Merz: Igloos - Pirelli HangarBicocca](http://artlyst.com//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MM2.jpg)
Vicente Todolí, curates the exhibition in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, bringing together Merz’s most iconic oeuvre of work; the artist’s enduring series of igloos – which date from 1968 until Merz’s death in 2003 – gathered from a number of private collections and international museums.
![Mario Merz: Igloos - Pirelli HangarBicocca](http://artlyst.com//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MM3.jpg)
Mario Merz, Le case girano intorno a noi o noi giriamo intorno alle case?, 1994. Igloos: 1968 – 2003, installation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo: P A Black © 2018.
Encompassing the vast space of the Pirelli HangarBicocca; the artist’s iconic domes are displayed together for the first time – the largest collection of Merz’s igloos to date, that inhabit the exhibition space with over 30 large-scale works in the form of an encampment of hemispheres – the artist’s sculptural dwellings.
Merz’s forms place the viewer in a fluctuating position between the sculptural and the installational, creating a dialectic between interior and exterior space. The viewer is placed in a landscape of sculptural forms; where the sculptures are external and akin to celestial bodies in orbit of one another, like partially ‘submerged planets’, yet the viewer also becomes an internalised element of the work.
![Mario Merz: Igloos - Pirelli HangarBicocca](http://artlyst.com//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MM4.jpg)
Image: Mario Merz, Senza titolo, 1985. Igloos, 1968 – 2003, installation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo: P A Black © 2018.
Each igloo has an internal space in which the viewer automatically projects their physical self – in fact the works are an archetype of physical habitation, each characterised by a metal dome-framework covered with numerous sculptural materials which include stone, steel, and glass – held together with clamps, or precariously held in place with daubs of clay – the artist’s domes simultaneously possess both the language of sculpture and installation.
![Mario Merz: Igloos - Pirelli HangarBicocca](http://artlyst.com//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MM5.jpg)
Image: Mario Merz, Noi giriamo intorno alle case o le case girano intorno a noi?, 1977. Igloos, 1968 – 2003, installation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo: P A Black © 2018.
Merz equated his igloos with basic nomadic structures, and the artist’s domes are often constructed in a seemingly unstable manner, expressing the fragility and impermanence of habitation; yet the artist saw them as the ‘ideal organic form’ that he ‘carried inside himself’.
Merz’s igloos are forms reflecting a timeless need for refuge, and community – as the ‘community of forms’ encounter one another within the space and communicate – the artist’s domes juxtapose a rather Beuysian use of materials; with the electrical, in the form of neon words and numbers (often mathematical sequences), the slow chemical transformation of substance – and running water, and light.
![Mario Merz: Igloos - Pirelli HangarBicocca](http://artlyst.com//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/MM6.jpg)
Image: Mario Merz, Senza titolo, 1978. Igloos, 1968 – 2003, installation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo: P A Black © 2018.
This was a sculptural oeuvre that would literally ‘build’ with complexity, evolving into a temporal journey through the narrative of a structure, and one wonders if Merz always intended that the outcome would be the grouping of the works into an interacting installation piece – a constellation of sculptural bodies formed into a single work?
The exhibition is both an oeuvre of individual works, and a single installation – incorporating one of the artist’s recurring motifs, the mathematical Fibonacci sequence referenced mathematically in neon – the equation behind the organic spiral found throughout nature – as the works orbit one another in an eternal expansion, finally seen in a physical context – as the ‘nomadic’ bodies form an installational galaxy.
Words: Paul Black @Artjourno, photos: P A Black
Article © Artlyst 2018
Lead image: Mario Merz, Senza Titolo (doppio igloo di Porto), 1998. Igloos: 1968 – 2003, installation, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2018. Photo: P A Black © 2018
Mario Merz: Igloos – Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan – 25 October 2018 to 24 February 2019