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THE TRANSPARENT MIRROR
ALBERT MERTZ AND LONE MERTZ

STALKE GALLERY - KIRKE SONNERUP

Stalke Gallery, Kirke Sonnerup, has invited Lone Mertz to create an exhibition based on the collaboration she had with Albert Mertz from 1974 until his death in 1990. The exhibition will include both known and unknown works, old and new, which form a cohesive installation.

Albert Mertz lived his life through a variety of artistic expressions, methods, and media, but as he often stated, "the differences are the same"! It was not about a specific style or form but rather about the most precise articulation of content and meaning, which repeatedly became the subject of new investigations and questions.

For part of his life, until his death in 1990, Albert Mertz worked in-depth with a philosophy of existence, which led him to explore the relationship between the colors red and blue—an interest that manifested in a Tibetan worldview.

This is the trail Lone Mertz continues to follow. 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 stands today in the mountains as a "fifth window" in a Tibetan temple. Like a blessing, it casts 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," 7 photographs printed on canvas and then painted over with paintings. The photographs depicted newly painted, blending, and thereby illusory windows that could not be seen through. They spoke of art that no longer needed transparency or a relation to the everyday world, art that blended in and installed itself, shutting off from its conventions.

Art in the exhibition space and gallery is a closed affair, one with a clear purpose. But the red-and-blue proposition still shows, perhaps as a kind of reserve, a path toward life's diversity, where the creative ability is the essential blueprint for humanity?

Lone Mertz has curated several exhibitions with Albert Mertz's works. Most recently, in 2010, she presented them at Kunsthalle Lingen in Germany, where some of the most significant pieces and large reconstructions of painted walls were exhibited. On October 6, 2011, the Daimler Contemporary in Berlin featured "Conceptual Tendencies 1960s to today," including 25 works by Albert Mertz, marking the first time his works found a place in German art institutions outside Denmark. This year, the long-awaited book on Albert Mertz, titled "Mertz om Mertz" (Mertz on Mertz), will be published by Vandkunsten Press.

Sam Jedig