in collaboration with
Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato

Twenty years from the great personal show Space is curved or right? dedicated to Mario Merz from the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, the central nave of the Leopolda Station hosts La spirale appare (The spiral appears), the tail of the great installation that in 1990 occupied the last two halls of the Prato museum.

Since the beginning in the work of Merz, a prominent figure in the Poor Art movement, the cosmic image of the spiral has become the distinguishing figure of his work, displaying the numerical sequence discovered by the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci and chosen by the artist to represent the processes that regulate natural growth.

The protagonists of the work, the exquisite and silent beech and chestnut charms that evoke, with their “furious shadow,” the daily life and the cyclical flow of time, while the supporting iron structure that remembers it recalls the swirling arc described by Spitale. Neon light is the unifying element that flows through the progression of numbers Fibonacci nullifies glass inertia and the weight of stacks of newspapers transformed from waste matter into a collection of fluid images that tell the noise and disorder of society.
Summing up the entire poetics of the artist, the work refers to one of the hints most of all the work of Merz, that of the Persian poet Rumi, often transcribed from ‘If the form disappears, its root is eternal.

The work is part of the collection of the Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci, acquisition 1990.