over 26 feet across, gold leaf squares are scattered around two large asymmetrical leaf-like forms. He even, occasionally, carved in marble, with which in 2002 he made five statues displayed from the windows of a building at the International Sculpture Biennale in Carrara. Merz said: "Space is curved, the earth is curved, everything on earth is curved" and subsequently produced large curvilinear installations like the one at the Guggenheim in New York. This retrospective was the artist's first major museum show in the United States. These last works are formally transcendent and unusually light. His site-specific works in archaeological sites redeem spaces from touristy tedium with a single neon line, which serves as source of aesthetic inspiration. He had the wild, immediate perceptiveness of a child. His works encapsulate this nature together with an uncanny universality and versatility. 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. Along with six other collaborations between artists and fashion designers on the occasion of the first Biennale of Florence that same year, Merz and Sander were assigned an individual pavilion designed by architect Arata Isozaki. Merz and Sander transformed their pavilion, which was open to the outside, into a wind tunnel inspired by the form of a 10-foot diameter cylinder. One end of the tunnel was fitted with an oculus through which the viewer could gaze into a vortex of blowing leaves and flowers through the length of a suspended fabric cone. Exhibitions Merz had his first one-man exhibition, in 1954, at the Galleria La Bussola in Turin; his first solo European museum exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975. He has since been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1975); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1983); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989); a two-venue retrospective at Castello di Rivoli and Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin (2005). In the years 1972, 1977, 1983 and 1992 Mario Merz participated in the documenta 5, 6, 7 and 9. In 1989, his work "Se la forma scompare la sua radice è eterna" was installed at the Deichtorhallen. Recognition Merz was awarded the Ambrogino Gold Prize, Milan; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna;