Kurt Schwitters, the German ‘multimedia’ Dadaist artist, who developed a somewhat contradictory tendency towards constructionism, considered Merzbau to be one of his most important works. Merzbau is a construction/installation he performed from 1923 to 1936 as an obsessive work-in-progress. The structure was created by partitioning the Schwitters family house in Hannover[1] into an unbelievable spatial assembly that housed his collection of various items, including artworks. Most of them were relics and memories of friends, mostly artists, and Schwitters describes Merzbau as a ‘constructed autobiography’. Merzbau was conceived as a work of absolute art that constantly changed with Schwitters’ personal life, so certain grottos – subspaces of the installation (grottos) disappeared beneath wooden panels and plaster, and new ones appeared.
[1] After his exile to escape the Nazis, he continued working on two new Merzbaus, first in a garden of a house near Oslo, and then in Elterwater in Great Britain, the only one that is still standing. From 1947 until his death in 1948, Schwitters managed to build just a single wall.