MASI in Lugano dedicates an exhibition to Hedi Mertens, an artist who investigates geometric abstraction

From April 2 to October 15, 2023, the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana presents the exhibition Hedi Mertens. The Logic of Intuition, curated by Francesca Benini and Arianna Quaglio. The exhibition project aims to return to the public the work and the unique story of an artist who, starting from a deep theoretical knowledge, found in Ticino the favorable conditions to apply it and develop her art.

An extremely versatile personality, Hedi Mertens (Gossau, 1893 - Carona, 1982) followed a classical painting education, but only began painting consistently in the 1960s, at an advanced age, after a life path full of exceptional experiences and encounters in Switzerland and abroad. He managed to produce, in just over two decades, a body of intense works, from which all the energy and strength of youthful work emanates. In his research the artist embraces the principles ofSwiss constructivist-concrete art, with respect to which his work can be considered a “poetic variant.”

Through a selection of more than thirty paintings covering the entire span of production from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, the exhibition traces the different stages and development of the work of this artist who is still little known to the general public. The analyses and compositional theories assimilated by Mertens thanks to the intense exchange of ideas with artists and intellectuals close toabstractionism and Swiss Concrete Art are evoked in the exhibition by a number of works by the four main representatives of Zurich Concrete Art: Richard Paul Lohse, Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Verena Loewensberg.

In his artistic research Hedi Mertens takes up and investigates some of the fundamentals of geometric abstraction. The square, the protagonist of her production, allows her in its absolute form to combine the logic of infinite combinatorial possibilities with a certain freedom, which follows her personal intuition. This approach is reflected above all in the choice of colors, whereby the artist renounces rigid schemes and chooses rather contrasts and color combinations guided by her own individual sensibility. In the final phase of his work one can recognize a departure from assimilated models to arrive at a decidedly more personal style. In the last paintings it is the white background that dominates over the other elements: the canvas is pervaded by a deeper spatiality and a meditative atmosphere, a condition that reflects the period the artist spent in Ticino.

The exhibition also features a number of letters, documents and testimonies on the artist’s biographical events.

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, where it will be presented in spring 2024. A bilingual Italian/German catalog published by MASI Lugano / Museum Haus Konstruktiv / Scheidegger & Spiess / Edizioni Casagrande, with texts by Francesca Benini and Evelyne Bucher and an in-depth essay by Medea Hoch on the work of Hedi Mertens, as well as images of all the works exhibited in Lugano and Zurich, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

The itinerary

“I paint pictures similar to yours, but only in a dream!” wrote Hedi Mertens in 1951 to Richard Paul Lohse, an artist and theorist who was among the leading spokesmen and promoters of concrete art. Together with the artist Leo Leuppi, another important figure in the Swiss art scene, Lohse was a frequent visitor to the Bünishof, the villa in the Zurich suburbs where Mertens lived with her second husband and which in the 1930s became a meeting place for important intellectuals and prominent figures of the time, including Carl Gustav Jung and Hermann Hesse. Hedi Mertens’ exchanges and valuable experiences during this period would find expression in her later artistic research, which was also influenced by her connection to India, born through her contact with the Indian holy man Shri Meher Baba and her two-year journey to the Indian subcontinent. The move to Ticino in 1952, first to Solduno and then to Carona near Lugano, is an ideal condition for Mertens’ last life project, who, perhaps thanks to the tranquility he found in southern Switzerland, resumed painting in 1960.

As can be seen from the early works in the exhibition, made in the early 1960s, for his compositions Mertens builds on the systematic methods developed by Concrete artists, which he had thoroughly analyzed. The square is the subject elected as the protagonist of all his works, built on pictorial orders often governed by arithmetic and geometric operations such as division, multiplication, contrast, centering, dispersion, digression, progression, symmetry, interweaving, rotation, and so on.

The influences of the Swiss concrete artists, with whom the first room of the exhibition opens, clearly emerge in the works of the early stages. For example, the work Quadrato costituito da unità colorate, with four squares joined to form a block from 1965, evokes the structure of the paintings of artist Camille Graeser, who composes structures on canvas based on quantum equivalence, in which squares of different sizes are ordered in such a way as to generate a progression. In contrast, the series of works entitled Equal Quadrilateral Units features square unit grids and dense lattices that recall the compositions of Richard Paul Lohse. Max Bill’s concrete works seem to have influenced some paintings such as Diagonal Sequence of Squares with Red Square from 1973, in which Mertens applies 90-degree rotation of the canvas, which thus becomes a rhombus. Constantly searching for new formal solutions, in those same years the artist experimented with different motifs, such as the square within a square, which implies the principle of the frame within the painting, or that of the subdivision of the canvas through “L” shaped elements.

“A symbiosis of square rigor and intuitive chromaticity,” has been called his work by art historian Ludmila Vachtová. Indeed, to the rigor of systems for his logic-based compositions, Hedi Mertens juxtaposes a freer choice of colors, moving from pastels to intense tones, from primary colors, integrating black and white to mixed colors, creating light-dark or cold-warm contrasts that follow his personal sense of colors.

Approaching the works of the last period, the complex geometric rules that characterized the artist’s early works come to a simplification, to resolve in a more lyrical and meditative language. The white color, which in the titles is defined by the artist as the mute element of the canvas, takes over from the other elements: a more mystical spatiality is thus generated, in which forms seem suspended in the pictorial field and are often grouped at the edges of the canvas (Four Squares in Space). The palette becomes cooler, favoring bright dark tones and together an opaque color range that lends greater solemnity to the composition. A tension toward harmony and contemplation, this of the last works, which characterizes the most autonomous figure of Hedi Mertens’ research and remains as the testament of an artist still too little known, whom this exhibition is intended to make rediscover.

For info: www.masilugano.ch

Image: Hedi Mertens, Equal quadrilateral units meet in a central square, detail (1969; oil on canvas; private collection)

MASI in Lugano dedicates an exhibition to Hedi Mertens, an artist who investigates geometric abstraction

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.