Fondazione Maxxi, containing Mario Merz.

The absence of large contemporary art venues in Italy has always seemed incongruous to me. Now there is the one-year-old Fondazione MAXXI.
"MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, is the first Italian national institution devoted to contemporary creativity and conceived as a broad cultural campus. MAXXI is managed by a Foundation constituted in the July of 2009 by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and houses two museums: MAXXI Art and MAXXI Architecture.

"The programming of the activities – exhibitions, workshops, conferences, shows, projections, educational projects – reflects MAXXI’s vocation as a place for the conservation and exhibition of its collections but also, and above all, a laboratory for cultural experimentation and innovation, for the study, research and production of the aesthetic contents of out time."
 

Mario Merz
Untitled (triple igloo)
1984-2002
glass, clamps, iron, unfired clay blocks, series of blue neon Fibonacci numbers from 1 to 8
individual igloo: cm 300x600, 400x200, 200x100
Permanent collection MAXXI Arte

The work is composed of three concentric glass igloos, delimited by dollops of crude clay and numbers in neon. In the Fibonacci’s sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, …), from the name of the Pisan mathematician who discovered it during the thirteenth century, each number is the result of the sum of the previous two, and the relationship between the numbers refers to a process of the growth of natural phenomena. For Merz, a representative figure of Arte Povera, the igloo was simultaneously “the world and a small dwelling”, a cosmological and personal space, both physical and mental: it is a circular idea in which energy and space are in perfect harmony and in relationship with the surrounding context.