For more than 30 years now Gerhard Merz (*1947) has been staging grand exhibitions at important international museums and galleries. As of 1977 he was represented at the documenta in Kassel four times consecutively and in 1997 he designed the German pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale.
Ever since his first public appearance at an exhibition at the Kunstverein Munich in 1971 his paintings have been regarded as a critical and reflected kind. His large-sized monochrome paintings are characterized by classical pigments and perfected manual workmanship. Merz wants an ’empty’ art, a kind of art which does not make false promises to the viewer. ‘Proportion, colour, light, these are the naked weapons of art. There is nothing more to it. Art as a necessary form of application, grammar within a defined horizon’, is his device. Herbert Molderings, exhibition catalogue Kunsthaus Bregenz 2007.