Martin Boyce

Can my sculptures dream? However astonishing this question may seem, Martin Boyce goes one step further, asking “whether sculptures, like the replicants in the film Blade Runner, are equipped with an artificial intelligence, or whether they acquire a life of their own through their conception and realisation.” Such questions lead us into the heart of a surprising sculptural oeuvre that Martin Boyce, born in Glasgow in 1967 and still living there today, has been developing since 2005 out of a cubic alphabet of pentagonal forms into a widely ramified modular system. Martin Boyce developed the forms, from which lampshades as well as floor sculptures, outdoor sculptures or telephone boxes are composed, after chancing upon a photograph from 1925 of a concrete tree sculpture by the brothers Joël and Jan Martel: “I laid cut-out forms flat on the table and came across a linear pattern based on the underlying structure of the trees. Slowly I began to read letters out of the recurring lines.” And it is not only this regularity underlying his works to which the success of Martin Boyce and his unmistakable sculptures can be attributed; rather, with his installation of 2009 in a Venetian pavilion at the Venice Biennale he managed, unmistakably even for a broad public, to bring about with apparent ease an almost symbiotic interlocking of interior and exterior space, of abstract sculpture and nature. So it may well be that Martin Boyce owes the Turner Prize 2011 first and foremost to such a moving approach to his work.

Exhibition:
Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 21/10/2011 – 8/1/2012