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Artist or Maker: Mario Merz (1925-2003)

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Literature: Predilezioni, Tre decenni di avanguardia dalla raccolta di Riccardo Tettamanti, Milan 1988 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).

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Notes: THE TETTAMANTI COLLECTION

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed and dated by the artist maggio 1972.

"A series of persons (sic) in a restaurant is more elementary than a series of numbers. The series is elementary, but people gathered for a common function constitute something more elementary. Numbers in the restaurant, persons in the restaurant, numbers like persons in the restaurant. One person plus another person makes two persons. Two persons plus one arriving person makes three persons. A real sum and a sum of people...(it is)...an artistic choice that describes not free time but real (collective) time" (Merz quoted in Mario Merz, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1989, p. 108.)

Following his extension of the Fibonacci series from natural forms into the arena of architecture, in 1972 Mario Merz extended his use of this remarkable numerical sequence into the realm of human activity and daily life in a series of restaurant based-works entitled A Real Sum Is a Sum of People. One took place in conjunction with his exhibition at the Jack Wendler Gallery in London in a pub in Kentish Town, another in a Turin restaurant and this work in a restaurant in Milan. Expanding in what Merz described as 'an accelerated manner', the Fibonacci series - one in which each number is the sum of the previous two - is a metaphor for the natural process of proliferation and is found in nature in many forms ranging from the reproductive rate of rabbits to the scales on the tail of an iguana. For Merz, the Fibonacci numbers - rendered in light (illuminating blue neon) - could be used tautologically reflecting the dimensions of a room or the number of steps in a staircase for example, to illustrate the mysterious interconnectivity of the world, its rootedness in nature and, by extension, the life that operates within this space.

In Senza titolo (Una somma reale g© una somma di gente) Merz has extended his use of the series to include the proliferation of human beings. The sequence of photographic panels, accompanied by a neon numeral from the Fibonacci series, documents the proliferation of people gathering to dine in a restaurant as co-ordinated by Merz and the Fibonacci laws of progression. Beginning with one person alone in the restaurant, Merz would document the arrival of the additional guests who would arrive in numbers in accordance with the Fibonacci sequence. In this way the proliferation of guests, united in the common and fundamental purpose of eating fills the space of the restaurant infusing it with the principles of his art and illustrating his idea of art as a socially interactive process. This work, as its title indicates, comprised in the end of a total of 34 people, two of whom were the Tettamantis themselves.

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