Fall of the House of Usher

Mario Merz was an Italian artist and a founding figure of the Arte Povera movement who worked across sculpture, installation, and drawing using unconventional materials including neon, igloo forms, and found objects. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed a distinctive vocabulary of spiral and Fibonacci sequences embedded into works made from humble substances such as clay, branches, and copper wire. His igloos, constructed from glass tubes and neon tubing, became signature forms that interrogated shelter, geometry, and the relationship between natural growth and human construction. Merz's practice rejected the aesthetics of refinement in favor of material directness and conceptual rigor rooted in postwar European modernism.

Milan, Italy