ART CITIES:Basel-Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce is a Scottish artist living in Glasgow, he awarded the Turner Prize in 2011. The exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, the artist’s first solo museum show, will focus primarily on sculpture and installation but will also present photography, wall works, and collage covering a fourteen-year period.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Archive

The exhibition includes complete and reconfigured installations such as the multipart “Do Words Have Voices”, exhibited for the first time since its original showing for which Boyce received the prestigious Turner Prize in 2011, as well as a newly arranged group of works that were exhibited at the 2009 Venice Biennale under the title “No Reflections”. This latter group includes, for instance, a pathway of concrete stepping stones, a black geometric chandelier, and a mass of fallen leaves which, upon closer inspection, are seen to be precisely designed, cut and folded objects. Boyce’s works contain a wealth of references. Of central importance are classics of modernist art and design. The artist cuts up Arne Jacobsen’s Series 7 Chairs and rearranges the pieces as mobiles in a way that seems to combine brutality with the fragility and lightness of early Alexander Calder pieces. On the one hand, the forms to which Boyce’s works relate are often powerfully influenced by the moral and economic values of a particular culture, on the other, they relate to the artist’s own horizon of experience. His works address the ways in which personal longings may be interwoven with the surfaces and traumata of collective spaces and ideals

 

Info: Curating: Søren Grammel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst (MGK), St. Alban-Rheinweg 60, Basel, Duration: 25/4-26/8/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun: 10:00-18:00, www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch