The Merz Foundation presents, from Monday, July 8th to Sunday, October 6th, 2024, the exhibition Something that removes the weight dedicated to Mario Merz, in the spaces of the Foundation in Turin at 24 Limone Street.

The exhibition features a selection of works by Mario Merz including installations, igloos, tables, canvases, and works on paper. At the heart of the exhibition is the major work Four tables in the shape of magnolia leaves (1985), exhibited for the first time in Europe on this occasion, created for the solo show by Sperone Westwater and Leo Castelli in New York.

Something that removes the weight starts from the concept described by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, linked to the need to identify the profound nature hidden behind patterns to reach the foundation of human thought, which in its diversity is always defined by laws that escape the passage

of time and the variety of environments.

In Lévi-Strauss' concept of structural anthropology, structures are recognized as something that belongs to the unconscious, similar to the reciprocity principle that is at the origin of the transition from nature to culture.

The phrase that gives the title to the exhibition, Something that removes the weight, was extracted from a writing by Mario Merz and is linked to this need to look at nature and the passage of time in order to achieve a sense of conceptual lightness, which is found at the core of the presented works. In the works on display, there are elements and concepts that reoccur and intertwine in a path that, quoting Merz, maintains the absurdity and lightness of the fable...