“Kurt Schwitters: Merz” at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich is a retrospective of the innovative and daring – but perhaps underrated – German painter, sculptor, typographer, and writer Kurt Schwitters. He was a famed pioneer of collage and star of the Dada movement, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2016. Situated within a bespoke gallery space designed by the late Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid, in the same building complex that once housed the famous Galerie Dada, the exhibition brings together 70 works in various media spanning the artist’s entire career.“One of the most fascinating aspects of showing the work of Kurt Schwitters for over 40 years is that the discoveries never end. That cannot be said for a lot of other artists,” says Mathias Rastorfer, CEO and co-owner of Gmurzynska Galleries. “When one of the great art historians of our time, Norman Rosenthal – who wrote a text for our book on this exhibition – rediscovers Schwitters and realizes that there is no artist living today who has not, in one way or another, been influenced by Schwitters, that is saying something.”Kurt Schwitters is best known as the master of collage, and for inventing his own form of Dada called “Merz.” This involved the use of everyday and found materials, such as old bus tickets and newspaper fragments, to create carefully composed, poetic collages – visual diaries of urban life. He described the word Merz as denoting “essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials [...] A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.”Zaha Hadid’s installation for the exhibition pays homage to Schwitters’ most famous work, the Hannover Merzbau, which was destroyed in an air raid in 1943. Schwitters created the room-sized sculptural assemblage, composed of grottoes of found objects and columns, in his house in Hannover between around 1923 and 1937. “The Merzbau is the construction of an interior from sculptural forms and colors,” the artist once explained. “Each part of the interior serves as an intermediary element to its neighboring part. There is no detail which makes a unified and circumscribed composition.”“The architecture for our ‘Kurt Schwitters: Merz’ exhibition was entirely Zaha Hadid’s concept, fully formulated before her death and discussed in detail with myself and with her team at Zaha Hadid architects,” explains Rastorfer. “Zaha’s admiration for Malevich’s work is well known today due to her previous work with Galerie Gmurzynska on her homage to Suprematism back in 2010. Her adoration of Kurt Schwitters’ work, however, is lesser known and will become fully apparent when seeing our exhibition.”“Kurt Schwitters: Merz” includes many important works by the artist including “Self-portrait with collage ‘Anna Blume’,” 1921, “Postcard to Dr. W. Dexel, Jena 23.3.22 Die Leipziger Michaelis,” 1922, “The Double Picture (Assemblage),” 1942, “Untitled (Heavy Relief),” 1945, “Die Frühlingstür,” 1938, “Aq. 10 (I Grind, You Grind, He Grinds.),” 1919, and “Merzzeichnung 156 (centre blue),” 1920. Together, these works reveal the genius of Schwitters’ practice and explain why so many artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, and Damien Hirst, have expressed their indebtedness to Schwitters.“Kurt Schwitters: Merz,” curated in collaboration with Cabaret Voltaire, runs through September 30 at Galerie Gmurzynska Zurich.
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