Dieter Schwarz

This first volume dedicated entirely to the drawings of Mario Merz, one of the best-known and most influential artists of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, contains reproductions of 300 drawings made from 1954 until the time of the artist’s death in 2003--many of which have never been published before. For Merz, drawing was an essential medium, at home and on his travels, not only because it was so portable and simple in terms of materials but because it allowed him to convey his mental and physical encounters “seismographically”--from singing birds to falling leaves to the noise of oncoming traffic. In his words, “All these things entered into the drawing, without directly entering it, but they entered into it as time, in the act of registration, as though the pencil were the tip of one of those instruments that record things on sheets of paper.” This essential collection contains drawings from the Objet cache-toi (Object, Hide Yourself) series; images of tables, cups and groups from the Garden of the Owls series, the Flying Flower Seeds and the Sydney Drawings; and large works depicting prehistoric “terrible animals.”