Artist: Helen Marten
Exhibition title: Fixed Sky Situation
Venue: König Galerie, Berlin, Germany
Date: January 12 – February 24, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Helen Marten works across sculpture, painting and writing to create a body of work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Alluding to language, systems and intentionality, her work across all media sets out to imagine the miraculous substructure beneath the veneer of our habitual lives.
The peculiar juxtapositions of material that Marten creates give attention to things that do not necessarily have a defined physical shape in the world: the notions of labour and work; the emotional capacity of paint or the verbal distortions of language are all bought into conversation. Whilst their complex references might not be made immediately explicit to the viewer there is something alchemic in the way the materials are collided and ideas are often communicated through the obstinate willfulness of the finished form. Hieroglyphic, yet charged with significance Marten’s material language is one that is tangentially spun out but rooted always to a diagrammatic logic.
There is a luscious, generous quality to the production of these works, with the strategies of layering and contingency bordering on obsessive. Metaphor is a widely used device and smaller groupings of objects – tableaux within a larger structure – could be described as articulations of verbs themselves difficult to parse. These works operate on the premise of an expanding set of ‘qualities’: motif and body, corruption and skeleton.
Fixed Sky Situation unfolds a ‘them’ sculpture, an ‘us’ sculpture and a ‘you’ sculpture. Each explores conditions of exclusion or corroboration, the shared or reciprocal experience of wielding a body with form and language, or the simple motifs of directional force – the compulsion to move from one territory to another. Each sculptural work enacts a diagram, making ambivalent social demands on its viewer. All bodies are people and all people preserve to some degree the lines of those who went before them.
Each of these works is bordered by a series of silk-screen paintings whose single and plural subjects seek to trace the snaking fever of a body’s pulse. They are chapters, each identically sized. Within the picture planes actions of authorial mapping spiral out: a census is taken, familial possibilities plotted, vanishing points spilled and recollected. And all this whilst multiple animal votives seek to violate planes of colour or abstraction. This is the chemical delirium of Nylon ink. Crests of paint overlap in thousands of layers, marking process with all the elastic springiness and potential of a rubber ball.
There are 8 new works in Fixed Sky Situation.
Marten spent 2017 working on her first novel, The Boiled in Between, which is forthcoming.
Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK) lives and works in London. She was awarded the 2016 Turner Prize, and the inaugural 2016 Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. She was also the recipient of the LUMA Prize (2012) and the Prix Lafayette (2011).
Recent solo exhibitions include: Drunk Brown House, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2016); Eucalyptus, let us in, Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Parrot Problems, Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Oreo St. James, Sadie Coles HQ, London (all 2014); No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (NY), USA (2013); Plank Salad, Chisenhale Gallery, London; Evian Disease, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Almost the exact shape of Florida, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (all 2012). Selected group shows include Second Nature, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2017); the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2016) and both the 55th and 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013 and 2015); Meanwhile…Suddenly, and Then, Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2013); New Pictures Common Objects, MoMA PS1, New York (2012). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Castello Di Rivoli, Turin, 2019 and Kunsthaus Bregenz 2020.
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, Fixed Sky Situation, 2019, exhibition view, König Galerie, Berlin
Helen Marten, A bath in italics (you), 2018, wood, steel, aluminium, Formica, cast bronze, glazed ceramic, cast resin, cast Jesmonite, pencil on paper, embroidered fabric, milled modelboard, paint, cast iron, clay, bitumen 265 x 650 x 420 cm; 104 1/3 x 256 x 165 1/3 in
Helen Marten, The colour of panic, 2018, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium 310 x 240 x 8.5 cm; 122 x 94 1/2 x 3 1/3 in
Helen Marten, An ocean wig, 2018, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium 310 x 240 x 8.5 cm; 122 x 94 1/2 x 3 1/3 in
Helen Marten, Census, 2018, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium 310 x 240 x 8.5 cm; 122 x 94 1/2 x 3 1/3 in
Helen Marten, Moral Clay, 2018, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium, airbrushed paper 310 x 240 x 8.5 cm; 122 x 94 1/2 x 3 1/3 in
Helen Marten, All mother (after James Ensor), 2018, nylon paint on fabric, ash frame, aluminium, airbrushed steel 310 x 240 x 8.5 cm; 122 x 94 1/2 x 3 1/3 in
