He explored the relationship between nature and the subject, until he had his first exhibitions in the intellectually incendiary context of Turin in the 1950s, a cultural climate fed by such writers as Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Ezra Pound.

[1] Merz discarded abstract expressionism's subjectivity in favour of opening art to exterior space: a seed or a leaf in the wind becomes a universe on his canvas.

From the mid-1960s, his paintings echoed his desire to explore the transmission of energy from the organic to the inorganic, a curiosity that led him to create works in which neon lights pierced everyday objects, such as an umbrella, a glass, a bottle or his own raincoat.

Without ever using ready-made objects as "things" (at least to the extent that the Nouveau Realistes in France did), Merz and his companions drew the guiding lines of a renewed life for Italian art in the global context.

[3] From 1969 Merz employed the Fibonacci sequence in performances and installations throughout his career to represent the universal principles of creation and growth: climbing up the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971) or the spire of a Turin landmark (1984), or perched in neon on a stack of newspapers among the old masters of Naples' Capodimonte Gallery (1987).

Merz became fascinated by architecture: he admired the skyscraper-builders of New York City; his father was an architect; and his art thereby conveys a sensitivity for the unity of space and the human residing therein.

In 1968 Merz began to work on his famous igloos and continued throughout his life, revealing the prehistoric and tribal features hidden within the present time and space.

By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1972, Merz had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolizing a locus of the human need for fulfilment and interaction.

His site-specific works in archaeological sites redeem spaces from touristy tedium with a single neon line, which serves as a source of aesthetic inspiration.

In 1996, Merz collaborated with Jil Sander on a fashion show, including a wind tunnel of sheer white fabric twisted and filled with blowing leaves.