In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space. The trees, unique sources of light in the exhibition space, produce their own environment. These sculptures, as if extracted from a set, are enough to suggest an atmosphere, a landscape, or a movie. Their nocturnal depiction is ambivalent, hovering between poetic beauty and the potential threat of a park at night. Romantic views of nature blend with modern ideas of optimism and equality. However, from it emerges from a deep anxiety or paranoia. The perceived space cannot be localized inside a certain reality, rather it pertains to the everyone’s imagination. Therefore, in the installation, the viewer produces what he sees around him with his own eyes and own journey through the space. Its space becomes the psychological and emotional space of an idler. When describing the piece, Boyce has stated that the sculptures move far from the visible and the material generating more of an emotional state rather than theoretical reflection. “My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in “Electric trees and telephone booth” (2006) and formal traces in works such as “We are still and reflective” (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real.
“My installations draw upon imaginary and fragmented landscapes. When I introduce an object within an installation, it recalls the world from where it is derived from, like a fragment, it is a exploded variation.” The universe of Martin Boyce is multifarious, extracting fragments of reference as varied as architecture, design, cinema, Scottish literature, Japanese poetry, etc. His forms do not fit perfectly within one category and exist more as ghosts of meaning. For instance, a sculpture can distinctly resemble a tilted ping-pong table although all the elements deviate from such a table to a great extent. Concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel made in 1925 for the Decorative Arts Exhibition in Paris are a recurrent theme throughout the work of Boyce, as well as replicas in Electric trees and telephone booth (2006) and formal traces in works such as We are still and reflective (2007). The artist sees these objects as a perfect “collapse” between architecture and nature. The sculptures, consisting of trees, gates, vents, signs, dot the exhibition space, becoming a stage. While the forms and materials from were conceived to be functional, Martin Boyce uses them less as objects of representation and more as objects of emotion. Their titles, extracted from fragments of poems, pop songs, slogans, exist as a way to “inhabit” the installations and poeticize the real. Martin Boyce was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1967 where he lives and works today.
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure...
In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island...
Martin Creed | The Dick Institute Experience the work of one of this country’s most ingenious, audacious and surprising artists at the Dick Institute ARTIST ROOMS Martin Creed presents highlights from the British artist’s thirty-year career...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...