La scala di Fibonacci, 1988

Mario Merz was an Italian artist who began drawing during the Second World War. He and his wife, Marisa Merz, were connected with the growth of Arte Povera. He cast aside the subjectivity of abstract expressionism and pursued instead the opportunities associated with the outdoors. As with many artists of the time, Mario Merz used mixed media in a variety of ways. For example, starting in the mid 1960s, he began exploring the ways in which life could transmit energy to inorganic material, and so he produced a number of works showing neon lights moving through such mundane objects as a raincoat or an umbrella. Starting in 1969, he started incorporating the Fibonacci sequence in many of his works as a symbol of the basic principles of growth and creation. One of Merz's most famous works is an installation of the Fibonacci numbers (a series in which any number is the sum of the two previous numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and so on) at the Centre for International Light, located in Unna, Germany.