Born 1967 in Hamilton, Scotland.
Lives and works in Glasgow.
Education |
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1986–1990 | Glasgow School of Art (Department of Environmental Art) |
1996 | California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles |
1996–1997 | MFA, Glasgow School of Art |
Awards |
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2011 | Turner Prize |
Solo Exhibitions (selection) |
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2019 | Just Beyond the Undertow, Convent Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent |
An Inn For Phantoms Of The Outside and In, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute | |
2018 | Hanging Gardens, A4 Art Museum, Chengdu |
Remembered Skies, Permanent Installation, Tate Britain, London | |
2016 | Do Words Have Voices, Tate Britain, London |
Spook School, CAPRI, Düsseldorf | |
2015 | Martin Boyce, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel |
Martin Boyce: When Now is Night, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence | |
2013 | Study: Eyes – Martin Boyce, David Roberts Art Foundation, London |
2011 | Commission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA |
Group Exhibitions (selection) |
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2020 | Out of Orders | Works from the Haubrok Collection Part 2, Neues Museum, Nuremberg |
2019 | In the Spotlight of the Night - Life in the Gloom, Marta Herford |
Out of Orders | Works from the Haubrok Collection Part 1, Neues Museum, Nuremberg | |
Negative Space. Trajectories of Sculpture, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe | |
Objects of Wonder - British Sculpture 1950s – Present, PalaisPopulaire, Berlin | |
2018 | She sees the shadows, MOSTYN David Roberts Art Foundation, Cardiff |
paperwork, Haubrok Foundation, Berlin | |
2017 | Mentally Yellow (High Noon), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich |
I am not my target audience, Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Dresden | |
ISelf Collection: The Upset Bucket, Whitechapel Gallery, London | |
2016 | L’Esprit du Bauhaus, L’Objet en Question, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris |
2015 | How to live? Visions of the future yesterday and today, Wilhelm-Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen |
Private Utopia – Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin | |
2014 | Urban/Suburban, City Art Centre, Edinburgh |
2013 | London: City of Disappearances, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco |
2012 | Common Ground, 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale |
2011 | The Sculpture Show, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
2009 | No Reflections, Scottish Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice |
2007 | Skulptur Projekte Münster |
Negative Space. Trajectories of Sculpture, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe |
Martin Boyce has reworked and reformulated iconic design objects, developing his own pictorial language based on a reading of the formal and conceptual histories of design, architecture and urban planning. In an extended act of homage, deconstruction and re-imagining, Boyce has, for example, assembled reconstructed versions of Charles and Ray Eames 1949 storage units or created mobiles with fragments of Arne Jacobsen’s chair from 1955. Since 2005, elements drawing on Jan and Joel Martel’s concrete trees constructed for the Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Pavilion of Transport at the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 have been an important part of the artist’s formal vocabulary. His recurring use of unlikely elements, among them sections of rusted chain-link fences or suspended metal chains of various thicknesses, freed from their function as demarcation or restraint, create oddly affecting sculptures.
While Martin Boyce’s oeuvre includes shapes drawn both from modernist and classic design sources, it also includes references to everyday urban objects, such as fences, trash bins, or telephone boxes. Transformed by Boyce’s vision of the history of design, these elements, remaining more or less reminiscent of utilitarian objects, create enchanted landscapes that appear as slightly laconic witnesses of past urban development programs but also imbue the formal vocabulary of contemporary urbanism with moments of unexpected tenderness and beauty.