NYAB Event - Virgil Marti Exhibition

Virgil Marti Exhibition

Elizabeth Dee

This event has ended.

In his installations, Marti engages the history of interiors, often combining pop-cultural and art-historical references to create hybrid objects and environments. This exhibition features new wallpaper designs, richly upholstered seating and a series of chromed mirrors that extend Marti’s investigation of the decorative grotesque and address the centuries-old themes of vanitas and memento mori.

Over the course of nearly two decades, Virgil Marti has developed a singular practice by creating sculptural objects with a functional purpose that are recontextualized through their surroundings, often with the use of wall treatments. In the front gallery of this exhibition, his Memorial Garden wallpaper, which employs once-fashionable textured flocking, presents a visual motif derived from an image of the colorful floral wreaths left at a pop star’s grave. By contrast, in the main gallery the color is drained from the wallpaper Austrian Swag, a trompe-l'œil drapery design of silky white fabric that exemplifies Marti’s adept treatment of materiality in much of his work.

Born in St. Louis in 1962, Marti has exhibited widely since the early 1990s. In addition to the 2007 Biennale de Montréal and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Marti has been the focus of numerous solo exhibitions, including the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (in collaboration with Pae White); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Participant, Inc., New York. He lives and works in Philadelphia.