Mario Merz: Time Is Mute

The Reina Sofía Museum dedicates a retrospective to the late Italian artist Mario Merz. The exhibition takes viewers to the sociopolitical context of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, when Merz began questioning the established system and the role of individuals as social agents.

Merz’s practice, linked to Arte Povera, incorporates a conscious use of organic materials such as clay, branches, wax and coal. From the application of these materials stem some of the recurring associations in the pre-modern imagery of the artist, for example fire, lightning bolts and arrows; figures with mythical and geological meanings – the igloo, the table, the spiral, the river; or ancestral animals like the rhinoceros and the crocodile.