Mario Merz likes to take up a lot of room. In this show the antique vaulted spaces of the museum were filled with igloos, iron-and-glass tables, representations of Fibonacci series, bundles of wood, heaps of newspapers; on the building’s facade a crocodile dragged along another numerical series made out of Merz’s signature neon tubes.

The tendency to fill up space, which is always present in Merz’s work, has been more noticeable ever since the artist began drawing from a repertoire of ideas based on the notion of transforming space. This conceptual basis of his work has been given visual form in