NARRATOR:  

In the center of the garden is a structure resembling an igloo, with slabs of glass balanced over slabs of stone. It seems at once temporary—or fragile—and timeless. This sculpture by Mario Merz is an example of Arte Povera, an Italian art movement from the 1960s and ‘70s that used simple gestures and humble materials to rebel against a stifling, even overbearing, art-historical legacy. Here are curators Gary Garrels and Apsara DiQuinzio. 

GARY GARRELS:  

One of the issues for Arte Povera artists was that they were living in Italy, surrounded by the fragments, the residue of hundreds and thousands of years of history. You know, stone monuments created from different civilizations, that still remained alive, even in their fragmented forms. And yet a sense of impossibility of replicating or duplicating these monuments of ancient civilizations. 

And so the Arte Povera artists became very interested in things of the present. Organic materials, fragile materials, that became very poetic. They were very interested in the cycles of nature. And I think this work embodies those contradictions, the tensions, the contrasts, that the stone evokes the idea of some kind of an ancient monument, like a Stonehenge. 

APSARA DIQUINZIO:  

Mario Merz was a leading figure of this generation of artists. And the igloo was one of his primary motifs that he would explore in many different iterations, over and over again, using many different materials. And for him, the igloo came to signify this nomadic structure that resonated with both primitive and contemporary cultures.  

GARRELS:  

So you bring together in this work the idea of different ancient civilizations, one that was about monumentality, and one that was about fragility, about change. 

NARRATOR: 

This sculpture was commissioned by a museum in Rotterdam, in 1988. In it, Merz commemorates the destruction of the city by the Germans at the beginning of the second world war. The lens inside the work focuses the sun on the stone. Over time, it’s intended to leave a dark scar, as a poetic metaphor for that destruction.