Wednesday 18 March 2015

Landscape Architecture Open Lecture: The Merz Barn Project

Ian Hunter, Director, Littoral Arts Trust

12.30pm—2pm

Ian Hunter is an artist and Director of the Littoral Arts Trust, Lancashire. After a number of years in New Zealand working as a curator and artist, he was subsequently Arts Officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties in London. He founded Littoral Arts with Celia Larner in 1990 and completed a practice based PhD at MMU in 1992.

The Trust is currently working to restore Kurt Schwitters' experimental art and architecture project, the Merz Barn (1947). Kurt Schwitters was a German born artist, closely associated with the Dada movement of the early 20th century. During his lifetime, he worked across many different art disciplines, creative traditions and media, and maintained an extraordinary output of collages, paintings, poetry, performance, theatre, photography, sculpture and installations. His influence on the development of Pop Art in the early 1960's and subsequent artistic movements is widely recognised. Denounced by the Nazi regime as a 'Degenerate Artist', he fled Germany, to Norway and later England, where he continued his work from his 'Merzbarn' in Cumbria until his death in 1948.