Mario Merz - ITALIA Theme Sale London Tuesday, June 29, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Pietro Sparta, Chagny

  • Catalogue Essay

    Mario Merz was one of the leading figures in the Arte Povera movement. His work combines a fascination with the material and metaphorical qualities of natural objects with concepts of infinity and repetition. Characteristic of his employment of humble materials, the present lot comprises bundles of twigs crowned by a blue neon tube and a stuffed bird. There is an evocative contrast between these materials, with the twigs and the bird suggesting the simplicity of rural life, and the neon light and the electricity seeming to suggest the urbanised, technological world.
    “The bundles of twigs represent wood, but at the same time they are interesting in their own right since they represent a quantity, a sequence of numbers. Furthermore, they are closely joined, which has a touching effect. If you take a single tree and isolate it, it becomes something evocative and fantastic. If you create an assemblage, you concentrate power, which transmits a naturally more visual emotion, but also a feeling of presence… The bundles of twigs are not in theory, but in feeling.” 
    (The artist, quoted in ‘Interview with Suzanne Pagé and Jean-Christophe Ammann’ in Mario Merz, exh. cat., Trento, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, 1995, p. 200)
    “Science tells us that, in nature, the elements all pass into one another; the meaning of nature is transformation. This led to the idea of creating a sculpture that was not fixed, that was not geometric – a construction that would be a transformation rather than a construction. Since neon light actually has electric power as one of its own object qualities, it turns into light when it fully and perceptibly transfixes the glass object, that is, the tube. Piercing the car, the bottle, the glass, the water, or the plant with the neon tube meant physically carrying the action of transformation from one element to another.”
    (The artist in conversation with Germano Celant, in Mario Merz, New York, 1989, p. 109)

13

Untitled

1993
Wood, taxidermy bird, wire, neon light and transformer. 
228.6 × 243.8 × 61 cm (90 × 96 × 24 in).

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

ITALIA Theme Sale

30 June 2010
London