"TRANSPARENT MIRROR"

Albert Mertz and Lone Mertz

Stalke Galleri, Kirke Sonnerup

1.10.2011 to 11.11.2011.

Stalke Galleri exhibition archive from 1987

View all Albert Mertz exhibitions at Stalke Galleri

Stalke Galleri, Kirke Sonnerup, invited Lone Mertz to create an exhibition based on the collaboration she had shared with Albert Mertz from 1974 until his death in 1990. The exhibition included both known and previously unknown works, old as well as new, which together formed a cohesive installation

Albert Mertz lived his life through a wide range of artistic expressions, methods, and media, but as he often stated, “the differences are the same.” His practice was not concerned with a specific style or form, but rather with achieving the most precise articulation of content and meaning—an approach that repeatedly became the subject of new investigations and questions.

For part of his life, until his death in 1990, Albert Mertz worked intensively with a philosophy of existence that led him to explore the relationship between the colors red and blue—an interest that manifested itself in a Tibetan worldview. This trajectory was one that Lone Mertz continued to pursue. A glass box she created for Glænø Beach in Denmark in 1993 was later relocated to a site in the Himalayas at an altitude of 4,400 meters, where it still stood in the mountains as a “fifth window” in a Tibetan temple. Like a blessing, it cast symbolic light on Albert Mertz’s final presentation of red and blue.

Albert Mertz’s 1972 presentation at Den Frie in Copenhagen was accompanied by the work Painted Windows, consisting of seven photographs printed on canvas and subsequently painted over. The photographs depicted newly painted, blended, and thus illusory windows that could not be seen through. They articulated an understanding of art that no longer required transparency or a direct relation to the everyday world—an art that merged with its surroundings and installed itself, closing off its own conventions.

Within the exhibition space, art and gallery functioned as a closed system with a clearly defined purpose. Yet the red-and-blue proposition still suggested, perhaps as a form of reserve, a path toward life’s diversity, in which creative capacity appeared as the essential blueprint for humanity.

Lone Mertz had curated several exhibitions of Albert Mertz’s works. Most recently, in 2010, she presented them at Kunsthalle Lingen in Germany, where some of the most significant works and large reconstructions of painted walls were exhibited. On October 6, 2011, the Daimler Contemporary in Berlin presented Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to Today, including 25 works by Albert Mertz, marking the first time his works were shown in German art institutions outside Denmark. That same year, the long-awaited book on Albert Mertz, Mertz on Mertz, was published by Vandkunsten Press.