NYAB Event - Martin Honert Exhibition

Martin Honert Exhibition

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

This event has ended.

Matthew Marks presents Martin Honert’s first exhibition in New York since 2007 consists of two new sculptures.

Group of Teachers is a sculpture comprised up of six life-size figures of men and women based on a black-and-white photograph of the teachers at the boarding school Honert attended as a child. The figures are cast in transparent layers of polyurethane containing visible particles of sand and glass, which reproduce the effect of the vintage photograph. Dormitory Model is a sculpture of the school’s dormitory and is based on an original photographic negative. The sculpture mimics the appearance of the negative, where the colors have been altered by the photographic process and the areas of shadow and light have been reversed. Martin Honert works slowly, painstakingly producing each of the pieces by hand in his studio over several years.

Commenting on the centrality of childhood to his work, Honert has said, “My childhood was no doubt just as dull and boring as anyone else’s. What’s important to me is to explore things that may well have happened a long time ago but continue to exist for me as an image, a memory.”

Martin Honert (born 1953) lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dresden. Last year, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin organized a full-scale retrospective of his work. Earlier this year, the photographer Jeff Wall curated an exhibition of his work for the Vancouver Art Gallery, which remains on view through October 14, 2013. Honert represented Germany in the 1995 Venice Biennale, and he has had one-person exhibitions at the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; the Kunstverein in both Hannover and Stuttgart; the École nationale supérieure d’art, Bourges; and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.