Beginning in 1923, what became known as the Merzbau (Merz construction) was constructed in Kurt Schwitters’s home and studio in Hanover: a vast structure made of wood, plaster, cardboard, found objects, and works of art, which spanned several rooms and was in a constant state of change. Over a number of years, the Merzbau evolved into a complex, cave-like structure with alcoves and pillars, with Schwitters incorporating a number of personal objects and collection pieces into it. Through his Merzbau, Schwitters created a walk-through “collage of life”, which he would occasionally show to friends and patrons, but never made publicly accessible. Today, the Merzbau is regarded as an early example of installation art. Because the building in which it was housed was destroyed during the Second World War, the Merzbau only survives today in the form of a handful of documentary photographs and reports, along with two replicas.

Background: The Merzbau was created at a time when Schwitters was shifting further away from painting in favour of creating more expansive, sculptural works. He saw the Merzbau as an outward expression of his own internal world and as an antidote of sorts to traditional art forms. When he fled Germany in 1937, he was also forced to leave the Merzbau behind in Hanover, and it was subsequently destroyed by a bomb in 1943. Schwitters was so profoundly affected by the loss that, for many years in exile in England, he clung to the thought of salvaging parts of the construction from the rubble. In the 1980s, Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger was able to produce two reconstructions of the main room of the Merzbau using photographs taken in the 1930s. The resulting replica, which is shown here, is largely true to the original.

From the 1920s onwards, Schwitters also created constructivist paintings, which were characterised by distinct, geometric forms, precise compositions, and bold colours. Constructivism was a revolutionary art movement that emphasised order, structure, and function and originated in Russia in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. Constructivist art was envisaged as a new kind of abstract art for a new world in the making. Schwitters was friends with leading proponents of constructivism such as El Lissitzky from the Soviet Union, Theo van Doesburg from the Netherlands, and László Moholy-Nagy from Hungary, with whom he shared a common desire to create art as a harmonious, “rational” system.

From 1932 onwards, Kurt Schwitters and his family spent their summers in a modest hut on the island of Hjertøya near the Norwegian town of Molde. He furnished the erstwhile potato storehouse in a simple manner and then started remodelling the building’s interior in the style of a new “Merzbau”. He collaged the walls with scraps of paper and built and painted wooden struts. Following Schwitters’s death, the hut was left at the mercy of the elements and fell into a state of disrepair. The hut’s significance as an art-historical relic and unique monument to the avant-garde, situated as it is in such an unusual location, was only fully recognised several decades later. In the 2010s, the ruins were conserved and transferred to the Romsdal-Museum in Molde as part of an ambitious salvage operation. Today, it can be viewed at the museum in its reconstructed form.

Created in Norway and England from 1937 onwards, Schwitters’s sculptural works are not especially well known. To create his sculptures, the artist employed simple materials that reflected his own humble circumstances, from which he devised a series of lyrical constructions. The sculptures are often built around pieces of driftwood, bones, or roots, which lend the construction its shape. Schwitters then covers the found objects with plaster, which gives the sculptures an abstract appearance and an improvised, experimental quality; they look almost like mock-ups for forthcoming, large-scale objects. At the same time, his sculptures also embody the notion of creating art using ordinary, everyday materials that are purposefully selected and then transformed into something new.

In 1944, while in England, Kurt Schwitters learned of the destruction of his Merzbau in Hanover. In 1947, he received a grant of 1,000 US dollars from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to retrieve and preserve the building’s remains – yet this would ultimately prove impossible. Instead, Schwitters used the money to build a new “Merzbau” in a barn near the village of Elterwater in England’s Lake District. Despite his deteriorating health, he started converting one wall of the barn into a sculpture. When he died on 8 January 1948, the Merz Barn remained incomplete. The wall of the barn that Schwitters worked on is still intact and can be viewed in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.