Zaha Hadid’s exhibition design for Kurt Schwitters: Merz opened to the public earlier this week at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich. In an article about the exhibition in T Magazine, senior designer and director at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), Patrik Schumacher said, “It’s literally the last project of Zaha, finished by her team.”
The exhibition, presenting seventy works – in all media – from each period of the artist’s career, honors five decades of the gallery showing Schwitter’s work. Hadid’s design is a reflection on the artist’s well-known, but destroyed, Merzbau, a sculpture that filled the artist’s workspace from 1923-1937. According to the Hadid’s office, “[Merzbau was] a living, inhabited collage, ever-shifting and expanding, and this was the starting point for [Zaha’s] exhibition design which pushes beyond mere random collage to embrace the unpredictable richness and the complex variegated order found in nature.” The design builds on an established relationship between Hadid and Galerie Gmurzynska; Merz following in the footsteps of an earlier exhibition space designed for another of the architect’s inspirations, Kasimir Malevich.
