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Lot Essay
"Conceptual Art is a sounding instrument between printed words, luminous writings, and letters scrawled in a hasty nervous instinctive calligraphy.
--Mario Merz
Mario Merz's Untitled (Fibonacci) typifies the artist's most iconic motifs, incorporating the Fibonacci sequence in neon lettering as well as a taxidermied reptile. The lights follow the gentle arch of the tracks of the reptile's footsteps across the surface of the wall. While the neon lights project themselves around the room, the undisputed protagonist of the work is the reptile from whom the Fibinacci sequence follows. The natural composition of the reptile parallels the Renaissance's recognition of the natural symmetry of the human body as most famously celebrated in Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The beauty in the golden ratio of classical antiquity and the return to the natural world celebrated in the Renaissance echoes the aims of the Arte Povera movement of which Mario Merz was such an active player in the return to the physical world through the incorporation of both industrial and natural materials in his working practice.
Projecting itself into its environment through its use of the industrialized neon lights, the present lot typifies the Arte Povera movement. By incorporating the industrialized materials and blending it with the taxidermined, natural form of the reptile, Merz insists on the immediate experience of art while also more closely connecting the individual to nature. Closely associated with the work of contemporary Italian artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and his wife, Marisa Merz, the work of Mario Merz most emphasized the individual's connection to nature and redefining what could be called 'Art' in the same tradition as the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp.
The Fibonacci sequence, invented by the Italian mathematician Leonardo da Pisa in 1202, is an organic mathematical progression - two 'parental' numbers giving rise to a third - that is echoed closely in nature. Da Pisa discovered that this simple sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and onwards to infinity, could be used to calculate the offspring of rabbits. Its proportions also relate to the proliferation and growth of many organic materials, among them such elements that appear frequently in Merz's work as leaves, reptiles, deer antlers, pinecones, seashells and iguana tails.
The sequence, as formalized by Merz into energizing but also dimensionless neon light, is an enlivening organic force that speaks of a potential development or extension into infinity. It is an organic extension of light and space but also a metaphor for the development of life. The sequence proliferates with such accelerating scale and rapidity that, as Merz recalled, it "inspired my idea that it was possible to represent with new faculties all the examples that occur in the world of expanding materials viewed also as vital living lives." (Mario Merz cited in Mario Merz exh.cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1989, p. 102). The Fibonacci sequence could therefore be used as a way of 'unloading' or transforming space. "A wall is a load (bricks, stones, lime, historical anxieties, psychological anxieties)" Merz explained, referring to works like Untitled (Fibonacci). "The numbers unload it the way music unloads the chemical density of the atmosphere. Music too has mathematical or numerical equivalences. Time is a tap root immersed in the ground (the date of birth). Time then develops in an objective and relatively free reality the way the tree develops from the tap root into the atmosphere" (Ibid).
--Mario Merz
Mario Merz's Untitled (Fibonacci) typifies the artist's most iconic motifs, incorporating the Fibonacci sequence in neon lettering as well as a taxidermied reptile. The lights follow the gentle arch of the tracks of the reptile's footsteps across the surface of the wall. While the neon lights project themselves around the room, the undisputed protagonist of the work is the reptile from whom the Fibinacci sequence follows. The natural composition of the reptile parallels the Renaissance's recognition of the natural symmetry of the human body as most famously celebrated in Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The beauty in the golden ratio of classical antiquity and the return to the natural world celebrated in the Renaissance echoes the aims of the Arte Povera movement of which Mario Merz was such an active player in the return to the physical world through the incorporation of both industrial and natural materials in his working practice.
Projecting itself into its environment through its use of the industrialized neon lights, the present lot typifies the Arte Povera movement. By incorporating the industrialized materials and blending it with the taxidermined, natural form of the reptile, Merz insists on the immediate experience of art while also more closely connecting the individual to nature. Closely associated with the work of contemporary Italian artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis and his wife, Marisa Merz, the work of Mario Merz most emphasized the individual's connection to nature and redefining what could be called 'Art' in the same tradition as the Dada movement and Marcel Duchamp.
The Fibonacci sequence, invented by the Italian mathematician Leonardo da Pisa in 1202, is an organic mathematical progression - two 'parental' numbers giving rise to a third - that is echoed closely in nature. Da Pisa discovered that this simple sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and onwards to infinity, could be used to calculate the offspring of rabbits. Its proportions also relate to the proliferation and growth of many organic materials, among them such elements that appear frequently in Merz's work as leaves, reptiles, deer antlers, pinecones, seashells and iguana tails.
The sequence, as formalized by Merz into energizing but also dimensionless neon light, is an enlivening organic force that speaks of a potential development or extension into infinity. It is an organic extension of light and space but also a metaphor for the development of life. The sequence proliferates with such accelerating scale and rapidity that, as Merz recalled, it "inspired my idea that it was possible to represent with new faculties all the examples that occur in the world of expanding materials viewed also as vital living lives." (Mario Merz cited in Mario Merz exh.cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1989, p. 102). The Fibonacci sequence could therefore be used as a way of 'unloading' or transforming space. "A wall is a load (bricks, stones, lime, historical anxieties, psychological anxieties)" Merz explained, referring to works like Untitled (Fibonacci). "The numbers unload it the way music unloads the chemical density of the atmosphere. Music too has mathematical or numerical equivalences. Time is a tap root immersed in the ground (the date of birth). Time then develops in an objective and relatively free reality the way the tree develops from the tap root into the atmosphere" (Ibid).