The dada artist fled the Nazis and settled in a Lake District barn, which he turned into an astonishing work of art. We meet the replica-making craftsman hoping to make it whole again – and create a colony of artists in its luscious lakeland surroundings
Adam Lowe has created extraordinary replicas of great works from around the world, including one of Tutankhamun’s tomb and a full-size bronze replica of Dippy the diplodocus at the Natural History Museum in London. But he has now taken on a very different challenge: a barn in Cumbria. More specifically, he wants to recreate and preserve the legacy of Kurt Schwitters, the great German dada artist, nonsense poet and experimenter in sound, who died in exile in the Lake District in 1948.
Lowe, through his non-profit Factum Foundation, has taken over the Cylinders Estate in luscious Elterwater, where Schwitters created his final unfinished masterpiece: the Merz Barn. This enigmatic work is a unique mixture of dry-stone walling and biomorphic plaster forms, encapsulating the private art that Schwitters created in exile. It has been championed by Damien Hirst and other leading artists as one of Britain’s secret treasures.
