MARIO MERZ PRIZE FOURTH EDITION – Finalist.

The artists selected for the fourth edition of the Mario Merz Prize approach the contemporary by not confining themselves to statements of complexity, but by penetrating its meaning with a dissonant approach and visionary ability.
Through their individual practices, each with its own linguistic and formal approaches, the artists invite us to experiment without fears of compatibility.

Anne Hardy creates environments which hover between the real and the imaginary. Her installations, which she calls ‘FIELDworks’, combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive, sensory environments that propose alternate realities or consciousness. Developed in a process that responds to site and space, these works draw upon places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – forgotten corners and voids in the urban landscape where materials and atmospheres gather and resonate. For Hardy, these ‘voids’ represent spaces of freedom embodying the possibility to exist fluidly between states of being, and she regards her FIELDworks as a way to conjure this energy in the gallery space, creating sentient environments that can be temporarily inhabited and experienced.