正在展出 | 马里奥·梅茨个展《早期作品》/ Mario Merz: Early Works
格莱斯顿画廊 ｜ 正在展出
马里奥·梅茨（Mario Merz）
《早期作品》Early Works
格莱斯顿画廊 ｜ 纽约西24街515号（切尔西区）
Gladstone Gallery, 515 W 24th St, New York
展期：2016年11月10日－12月17日
作为20世纪60、70年代意大利“贫穷艺术”运动的领头人物，马里奥·梅茨（Mario Merz）的创作涉及绘画、雕塑和装置艺术。他的作品反对单一文化，展现了事物难以捉摸的复杂性。为了保持作品的独创性，梅茨偏离于波普艺术中普遍存在的大众文化图符，抽象表现主义中无处不在的情感流露，以及极简主义强硬的冷漠姿态。相反，梅茨和他的“贫穷艺术”同伴们——阿里杰罗·波堤（Alighiero Boetti）、卢西亚诺·法布罗（Luciano Fabro）、简尼思·库耐利斯（Jannis Kounellis）等——在作品中使用朴素的日常生活材料，透过对自然的敏锐观察，使作品处于具有关联性的存在主义不确定性中。
本次展览展出的三件重量级作品皆体现了这种策略。作品《武元甲的雪屋－假如敌军集结，就会失去领地；假如敌军分散，就会丧失战力》（Giap Igloo – If the Enemy Masses His Forces, He Looses Ground: If He Scatters, He Loses Strength, 1968）代表了梅茨自1967年开始创作、贯穿于他整个创作生涯中的以圆顶雕塑为主题的系列作品。这些圆顶用外部世界构建出内部空间，体现了梅茨希冀借助社会传统作为个体反思手段的倾向。独立的半球体结构因不具有任何居住者而被剥离了实用性功效，呈现出无意义的存在状态。圆拱外部的霓虹灯字样则进一步对圆顶的客观形态中注入了主观旨意。这一出自越南南方民族解放阵线将领武元甲（Vo Nguyen Giap）的著名游击战宣言，描述了一种战斗策略进退两难的处境。发光的字母与碎裂的陶土外部结构之间则产生了强烈的视觉张力，从而突出了艺术家对于社会常规的执迷——在此体现于军事和政治规范。
梅茨的箱状作品《静坐》（Sit-in, 1968）进一步展现了他对于透过朴素生活材料探索集体意识的兴趣。作品的标题指示了用身体占据空间这一物理动作——经由雕塑在画廊地板上的位置加以强调，同时也借由“静坐”这一常见于抗议活动的手段，反映出1968年世界范围内愈演愈烈的政治抗议气氛。透过这一示意动作，梅茨强调了静坐作为个人姿态和集体行为的社会意义。
梅茨的大型装置作品《莱顿瓶》（La bottiglia di Leyda）将他对于“贫穷艺术”的探索推向了一个视觉巅峰：艺术家透过对日常材料的使用，对物理空间作出了高度个人化、同时具有普遍性意义的重新定义。梅茨将画廊的所有墙面用金属丝网覆盖，使观者置身于大胆接纳了自然世界的公共环境中，而霓虹灯则拼写出斐波那契数列——这一在自然中广泛存在（从松果到蜗牛壳）的令人惊叹的数字序列。在这件作品中，斐波那契数字强调了这样一种观念：即使我们周遭的世界有时难以理解和混沌，但它依旧透过某种秩序将万事万物联结。
马里奥·梅茨1925年出生于意大利米兰，2003年在此去世。他曾被授予日本“高松宫殿下纪念世界文化奖”、奥斯卡·柯克西卡奖和卡塞尔文献展阿诺德·博德奖。梅茨曾在众多国际知名艺术机构举办个展，其中包括葡萄牙波尔图塞拉尔维斯基金会、德国杜伊斯堡维尔哈姆·伦布鲁克博物馆、巴塞罗那塔比埃斯基金会和纽约古根海姆博物馆。他的作品被巴黎蓬皮杜艺术中心、华盛顿赫希洪博物馆和雕塑园、纽约现代艺术博物馆、阿姆斯特丹市立博物馆、明尼阿波利斯沃克艺术中心、芝加哥艺术博物馆等重要艺术机构纳入公共收藏。梅茨基金会坐落于意大利都灵，致力于展示马里奥·梅茨的作品，并定期举办由赞助者资助的其他在世艺术家的作品展。
A leading member of Italy’s Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, Mario Merz created paintings, sculptures, and installations with an aim to oppose a monolithic culture and to celebrate perplexity. This goal manifested itself in the artist’s deviation from the mass-media iconography popularized by Pop Art, the mythic emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, and the machismo detachment of Minimalism. Instead, Merz and his Arte Povera contemporaries – such as Alighiero e Boetti, Luciano Fabro, and Jannis Kounellis, among others – employed simple, everyday materials and perceptive references to nature in order to ground their art in a relatable existential ambiguity.
The three seminal works on view in this exhibition exemplify this stratagem. Giap Igloo – If the Enemy Masses His Forces, He Looses Ground: If He Scatters, He Loses Strength (1968) represents a body of work that became an enduring motif throughout Merz’s career, since he began making igloo sculptures in 1967. Using the exterior world to create an interior space, igloos encapsulate Merz’s drive to utilize social tradition as a means for individual reflection. At once a freestanding structure, this hemisphere is rendered meaningless without an inhabitant to provide utilitarian import. The instillation of subjective weight onto the objective form of the igloo is underscored by the neon words circumscribing the dome. A quotation from General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front describing the double-bind of combat strategy, the glowing letters provide a visual tension to the cracking clay exterior, while highlighting the artist’s fascination with social mores – in this case, military and political custom.
Further showcasing Merz’s interest in exploring a collective conscience through prosaic media is his boxlike sculpture, Sit-in (1968). The title of the work invokes the physical act of using one’s body to occupy space – a fact emphasized by the position of the sculpture on the gallery’s floor – and also points to the global escalation of political protests in 1968, of which the sit-in was an often-used technique. Through this gesture, Merz emphasizes the social significance of sitting as individual stance and collective action.
The large-scale installation, La bottiglia di Leyda (Leyden Jar), provides a visual culmination of Merz’s Arte Povera endeavors: physical space is redefined as both deeply personal and simultaneously universal through the use of common materials. With wire mesh covering every wall of the gallery, Merz invites viewers into a communal environment that proudly incorporates the natural world, all while neon lights spell out the Fibonacci sequence. A remarkable numeric sequence that seems to exist throughout nature (from pinecones to snail shells), the Fibonacci numbers in this work stress a belief that, even though the world around us is sometimes inexplicable and chaotic, there is an order uniting us all.
Mario Merz was born in 1925 and died in 2003 in Milan, Italy. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; and the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel. Merz was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Welhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is included in many prominent public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.
关于格莱斯顿画廊
格莱斯顿画廊（Gladstone Gallery）由芭芭拉·格莱斯顿女士（Barbara Gladstone）于1980年在纽约曼哈顿创办，目前在纽约和布鲁塞尔有多家分部。画廊代理近五十位著名在世和已故的艺术家。
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