Martin Boyce

Turner Prize 2011

Can my sculptures dream? As surprising as this question may seem, Martin Boyce goes one better, namely "whether sculptures, like the replicants in the film Blade Runner, are endowed with artificial intelligence or whether they are given a life of their own through their conception and realisation". Such questions lead us to the centre of a surprising sculptural work that Martin Boyce, who was born in Glasgow in 1967 and still lives there today, has been developing since 2005 from a cubic alphabet of pentagonal shapes for a widely ramified modular system. Martin Boyce developed the shapes that make up lampshades as well as floor sculptures, outdoor sculptures and telephone boxes after accidentally finding a photo from 1925 of a concrete tree sculpture by the brothers Joël and Jan Martel: "I laid cut shapes flat on the table and came across a linear pattern based on the basic structure of the trees. Slowly, I began to read letters out of the recurring lines." And it is not only this regularity that underlies his works and to which Martin Boyce's success with his unmistakable sculptures can be attributed; with his 2009 installation in a Venetian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, for example, he also succeeds in creating an almost symbiotic interlocking of interior and exterior space, abstract sculpture and nature, which cannot be overlooked by the general public. It may well be that Martin Boyce owes the Turner Prize 2011 first and foremost to such a touching approach to his work.

Exhibition:
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 21/10/2011 - 8/1/2012