Urban Igloos
Rajesh Punj

There is an incredible monumentality to how they see things at Hangar Bicocca, Milan; and under the stewardship of director, curator Vicente Todolí, the institution’s scale appears to have gone through the roof, or as near as damn it. For the close of 2018, into 2019, Mario Merz, celebrated heavy weight of Italian art enters the aircraft hangar sized space, with works that are still as alien as they were innovative. Thus their inclusion at Hangar Bicocca, as with Lucio Fontana’s environments earlier in the year, appear entirely apt for the temporary relationship of the venue’s over-arching space, with Merz’s materialled igloos. Resurrecting the critical and cultural significance of these Modern Masters, Todolí appears to relish in his reappraisal of such leading lights, for their having significantly altered our understanding of everything as art. As with this new ‘constellation’ of works by Merz, that has the appearance of a settlement.


Responding to post-war industrialisation, Merz as a pupil of Art Povera, adopted an almost primitive approach to his practice; and rather than representing the world by abstract or figurative means, the artist turned huntergatherer, chose to bring everything in, sticks, stones, clay and metal, in order to create his own. Clamping roof slates and shards of glass to a ‘citta irreale’ of curved metal frame, Merz morphed his makeshift materials into the skin and bones of his urban igloos, which in retrospect appear entirely ‘of the moment’. As though the unorthodox elements originally held together by the artist’s hand, are here seized by his spirit. And as an artist with greater terrestrial tendencies, Merz would, by performative means, gather together the earthly and unattractive materials that were at hand, in order to create these partially inwardly outward looking enclosed spaces, that for their semi-circular structure resemble the igloo or snow houses of the Arctic’s Inuit/Eskimos. In his own words suggesting how “the igloo is a home, a temporary shelter, since I consider that ultimately today, we live in a very temporary era, for me the sense of the temporary coincides with this name: igloo.”

Entirely removed of their below zero degree setting, replacing snow with more urban elements, these ugly igloos became Merz’s favoured form of expression, making more than thirty from the late 1960’s, into the new millennium; in a personal attempt to understand space, and of its influence and involvement upon our lives.