Jason Martin
14 June - 28 September 2011
JASON MARTIN
Oils and Pigments
14 June - 28 September, 2011
The Galería Javier López - Mário Sequeira is presenting the first solo
exhibition in Madrid by Jason Martin (b. Jersey, 1970), who is
considered one of the most important British painters of his generation.
He was trained at the Chelsea School of Art and at Goldsmiths College,
London, and among his major concerns during this period were landscape
and abstraction. Taking as a point of departure two movements so
apparently contradictory as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, he
decided to move beyond the reductionism of Pollock or Ryman to explore
the more sculptural elements of painting. What interested him in "action
painting” was its gestural and performative quality, the process of
execution, viewing painting as both stage and happening, while in
Minimalism he was attracted by the potential of working in monochrome
and reexamining the boundaries between the conventional genres of
painting and sculpture.
Though recognisably within the modern traditions of gestural and
monochrome painting—he acknowledges the influence of such artists as
Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana—Martin has developed a distinctive style
that is based on the use of oil and acrylic paint applied in a
continuous stroke, layer upon layer, on hard, reflective materials like
aluminium and steel, giving play to interactive light effects which
bring dynamism to his composition. He aims to explore the transformative
properties of colour, as it transcends its material manifestation,
creating a sensation of movement through form and texture. As Luca
Massimo Barbero noted in an interview with the artist: "Colour is its
structure, gesture is its composition”. At the same time, the trace of
the physical movement of the artist’s body through the picture’s space
gives palpable expression to his presence in the process of creation as
well as the work’s physical surface. The image is projected through the
picture’s plane into the viewer’s space making appeal to both sensuous
and emotional perception.
Since the mid-nineties, Jason Martin has been included in various group
exhibitions of contemporary British painting. In 1997 his work was in
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the
Royal Academy in London, and in 2004 his work was part of Monocromos at
the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. He has had solo exhibitions in Europe,
the United States and Japan, most recently Nomad at the CAC in Málaga,
2008, and Vigil at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, 2009. His
work is featured in numerous public collections around the world,
including the Government Art Collection and Birmingham Museum in Great
Britain; the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, and the Hirshorn Museum,
Washington, D.C., in the United States; the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn
in Germany and the Museo d’Arte Moderna in La Spezia, Italia. In Spain,
his work is to be found in the collections of IVAM in Valencia, the CAC
in Málaga and Es Baluard in Palma.
www.galeriajavierlopez.com
|