Gerhard Merz

Preoccupation with the theory and practice of architecture has been of central importance for Gerhard Merz's artistic work from the very beginning. In his spatial installations created at the end of the 1980s, he placed monochrome wall paintings, architectural elements and pieces of writing in a context of a total work of art. His idea was to achieve a synthesis of painting and architecture. It therefore resembled a manifesto when the artist put the words "Ed io anche sono architetto" ("And I'm also an architect") on one of his writing-paintings in 1992. At the 1997 Venice Biennale he redesigned the interior of the German pavilion. Immediately afterwards, a building owner in Hartha near Dresden offered him the chance to realise his architectural vision of bodies, space and light. In a combined office and Werkdokumente series, the 'unrelenting aesthete' pits measurement and number, proportion and clarity, geometry and symmetry against the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness of today's building styles.