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Provenance: Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1980.
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Exhibited: Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Europe in the Seventies: aspects of recent art, October-November 1977 (illustrated, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, March-May 1978; San Francisco, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June-August 1978; Forth Worth (Texas), The Forth Worth Art Museum, September-October 1978 and Cincinnati (Ohio), The Contemporary Art Center, December 1978-January 1979.
Essen, Museum Folkwang, Mario Merz, January-March 1979, no. 32. This exhibition later travelled to Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, (illustrated, p. 58).
Cologne, Rheinhallen Messegelände Western Art, Contemporary Art since 1939, March 1981, no. 814 (illustrated, pp. 321 and 486).
Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Mario Merz, April-May 1985, no. 14.
Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung München, Mythos Italien-Wintermärchen Deutschland, March-May 1988, no. 155 (incorrectly illustrated).
Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Beyond Switzerland. Works by Contemporary Swiss Artists, January-February 1995, (illustrated in colour, p. 59).
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Literature: ARC, exh. cat., Paris, Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris/Kunsthalle Basel, 1981 (illustrated, unpaged).
Über Mario Merz, exh. cat., Vienna, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, 1983, (illustrated, p.71).
Mario Merz, exh. cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1989, no. 92.
Mario Merz, exh. cat., Los Angeles, MOCA, 1989, (illustrated, p. 76).
Mario Merz, exh. cat., Ascona, Museo Communale d'Arte Moderna, 1990, (illustrated, p. 31).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Mario Merz's igloos are the artist's best-known and most popular works. Dating from the late 1960s and appearing periodically throughout the artist's long career, they are the most resonant and recognisable icons of arte povera. Igloo Objet cache-toi is one of the earliest and most important of these celebrated works. (This unique version of the now destroyed original was made by Merz in 1977 for the exhibition 'Europe in the Seventies' held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington and the San Francisco MoMA)
A self-supporting structure made out of elements from its immediate environment, the igloo is both a shelter and a powerful symbol of an ancient, independent, self-supporting and ecological way of life. It was these inherent qualities of the igloo that appealed to Merz when, in the midst of heavy and often violent political debate of the late 1960s, he first decided to use the igloo as a platform for his art. Symbolising self-sufficiency, shelter, refuge, and an alternate way of life, these nomadic structures were also powerful images of protest against the restrictions and capitalist bourgeois values of the ruling authorities.
Executed in 1968, the Igloo Objet cache-toi is the second igloo that Merz made. It is both the opposite of and a companion piece to his first igloo, the Igloo de Giap of 1967 now owned by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A dense and enclosed structure, encased with bags of mud, the Igloo di Giap, was dedicated to the famous saying of the Vietcong General and victor at Dien Bein Phu, Vo Nguyen Giap: 'if the enemy masses his forces he loses ground, if he scatters he loses strength.' This provocative and, in the light of Giap's ambitious Tet offensive one year after this igloo was made, prophetic, phrase was written in neon lettering affixed to the outside walls of the igloo. Merz's second igloo, Igloo Objet cache-toi, made out of panes of sheet glass affixed to metal rods in 1968, is, by contrast, a completely transparent structure. The neon lettering affixed to the outside of this structure is again a political statement, being taken from the graffiti 'cache toi: objet' that adorned the Richelieu hall of the Sorbonne during the Paris riots of May 1968. 'Objet cache toi' means both 'Object : hide yourself' and alternatively, and more appropriately in this case, 'Object for hiding yourself.'
Merz saw his igloos as a place of refuge and shelter from the assault of modern capatalism and its consumerist values that translated everything into an object for sale. As he explained in an early interview with Germano Celant, his igloos were a self-generating and self-supporting 'anthropoligcal structure,' originally based on the dimensions of a man lying prone on the floor in which he could rest, shelter, or, as is suggested in this work, hide. 'I worked on the first igloo throughout 1967' Merz recalled, 'The igloo's dimensions were based on a two-metre diameter. Later the dimension of the igloo's diameter increased to three metres. Then in subsequent years the diameter increased to four and to six metres. The dimensions of the diameter bring out form structure dimension and size, anthropologically correct size. Even the initially correct dimension of a two metre diameter indicates, in the person seated within this capsule, how, in order to live an idea, the way in which the art of the work has, in an of itself, its sole support. The small building, lord of the space, atom of the space, supports itself in space, on its own creates the interior, by way of being the measure of anthropological space, and on its own creates its exterior; it creates the exterior space by the fact that it is the measure of an interior space. IGLOO=HOUSE.' (Mario Merz cited in Arte povera in collection, exh. cat., GAM, Turin 2000, p. 184).
Despite the atavistic or childlike desire for entering, sheltering or hiding that the archetypal form of the igloo instils, it would, of course, be impossible to physically hide in Igloo Objet cache-toi as, in direct contrast with its predecessor the Igloo di Giap, it is a completely transparent, fragile and sharp-edged structure. The deliberate paradox of the igloo's title (object to hide yourself) reinforces the sense that any hiding involved, would not be a physical hiding but a metaphorical one. In fact, the transparency of the glass and the openness of the structure combine with the radiating neon light of the title to lend the work an almost mystical or futuristic appearance that seems to offer the promise of some kind of talismanic or even spiritual protection from unseen forces. The transparency of the igloo also emphasises its hemispherical structure, a structure which, with its connotations of a cathedral dome, reinforces the notion of the form's ability to spiritually transform space.
With the enclosed walls of his first igloo, Igloo di Giap, Merz had encountered the problem that its solid mud bag-filled walls segregated the interior from the exterior into visible and invisible space. The advantage of using glass in this second igloo meant that the same elegant and roughly hemispherical structure was maintained without disrupting the visual continuum of space through both the interior and exterior of the work. As Merz recalled, he 'made the igloo for three interesting reasons. First, to abandon the projecting or mural plane, then to create a space free of the concept of hanging things on walls, or else removing them from the wall and laying them down on a table... the igloo concept is a concept of absolute space in itself. It is not modelled, and its hemisphere resting on the ground' (Mario Merz; Artist's statement cited in Germano Celant, "Mario Merz", Domus, no. 499, Milan, June 1971, pp. 47-49).
This perfect, anthropological, archetypal and mysterious basic structure of shelter and spiritual salvation is surmounted with a political slogan. Merz had provacatively used General Giap's saying on his first igloo and had also made his first political slogans in neon in 1968. These included, 'Sit-in', 'Solitary Solidarity' (Solitaro soldale) and an adaptation of Lenin's famous phrase 'What is to be done?' (Che fare?) all written in neon and embedded in wax. Responding to precedents set by contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman and Pier Paolo Calzolari, Merz adopted neon in his own work as an energising feature that could be appended to his work in order to infuse them with a resonating sense of purpose and visual poetry. The luminosity made available by neon was important for Merz because it generated what he once described as 'the visibilty of the whole.'
Merz's glass igloos, he maintained, like neon, established a similar sense of the visibility if the whole. Recordings of the partially nomadic nature of Merz's own artistic journey, his igloos are essentially mystical spaces that, Merz pointed out in a recent interview, also 'adapt each time they change position, even geographically. By moving objects around, they become self-differentiating. This is also true for a statue or a painting, and the mysterious functions at work here reveal psychological consciousness. Some baroque staircases are designed to make ostentation simple as you walk up them, the steps on a ship do not produce the same effect, yet they are both staircases. The igloo gives an interpretation of a place, it avoids the mechanical need for a rapport with a location and inasmuch becomes visionary. In fact, it chooses its visionariness and in so doing loses its wish to be useful. It is poetry that acquires a certain scent of visionariness.' (Mario Merz: in Danilo Eccher 'A conversation with Mario Merz' in Mario Merz, exh. cat., Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires 2002, p. 25).
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