Albert Mertz

Painted box, 1989

The name Albert Mertz stands on the horizon of the European post-war avant-gardists for an anarchistic and lustfully destructive opus, whose underlying conceptual and constructive strictness nevertheless always reveals the emphatic questioning of the social and communicative roles of art. Mertz demonstratively emphasized the ‘non-intact’ and conservationally speaking the battered nature of the physical form of his works to focus the viewer’s attention on the authenticity and stringency of the thought. Albert Mertz – that was the representative of an artistic attitude which, while transitioning through practically all media of visual and acoustic form finding, slaved away on the question of whether aesthetics and responsibility are to be understood as mutually exclusive or symbiotic The group of works acquired by the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection persues and reflects on a variety of states of the artistic conception by Albert Mertz. The assemblage Burnt Area, the black-and-white photogram and the collage Buttons from 1957/60 is a reflection of his occupation with Dada, Schwitters and the European development of Zero and Nouveaux Réalisme. You can see the material varieties of the concept “Rot/Blau Vorschlag” [Proposition red/blue] developed between 1970 and 1990 in a group of free hanging and on the floor standing visual objects with acrylic on cardboard, plywood and wood or mounted canvas, from the 1980s on with snapshotlike photographies.