MARTIN BOYCE – HANGING GARDENS
27.04.-29.07.2018
LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu

LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum is honoured to present “MARTIN BOYCE – HANGING GARDENS”, the first institutional presentation of Martin Boyce’s work (*1967, Hamilton UK) in China. Situated on the ground floor of the museum, this extensive exhibition encompasses over 30 works by the Scottish artist dating from 2004 to 2018. Martin Boyce’s sculptures, objects and wall pieces create a poetic and fragmented landscape that moves between an abandoned urban park, a garden and an inner court-yard with close-by domestic quarters.

Passing a telephone booth at the entrance, visitors step into the exhibition through a tilted fence to discover an open scenery which unfolds like a scroll painting, detached from any fixed place and moving seamlessly between past, present and future. The modest architecture is punctuated by semi-transparent screens made from corrugated fiberglass material, acting as permeable boundaries between interior and public spaces, between inside and outside, collapsing architecture and nature.

展览现场，马丁·博伊斯，空中花园，麓湖·A4美术馆，成都，中国，2018，致谢艺术家及麓湖·A4美术馆

Exhibition view, Martin Boyce, Hanging Gardens, LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2018, Courtesy the artist and LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum

展览现场，马丁·博伊斯，空中花园，麓湖·A4美术馆，成都，中国，2018，致谢艺术家及麓湖·A4美术馆

Exhibition view, Martin Boyce, Hanging Gardens, LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2018, Courtesy the artist and LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum

Boyce creates an atmosphere which is neither tangible nor easily articulated: meandering through the space we see an ambiguous scene, an eerie but poetic moment, an unutterable feeling in a dreamy ‘noir’ landscape. The diffuse lighting at the centre of the exhibition situates the scene at dusk or dawn and brighter illuminations in the adjacent spaces draw attention to the fact that the scenery might be populated by all kinds of strange phantoms and figurative presences such as masks and birds. These characters spark uncanny narratives, making the scene feel lost in reverie and animating this inexplicable afterimage of a certain memory.

In the central, 7-meter high space of the exhibition, a large group of chimney sculptures are arranged alongside suspended chain mobiles, reminiscent of willow trees, some of them include lanterns. “There is a simultaneous sense of being inside a piece of architecture with pillars or in a forest of trees or walking among chimneys on a rooftop with overlapping aerials silhouetted against the sky.”, describes Boyce, pointing out that he likes to thinks of the aerials as transmitters of information and language (as well as receivers). This grouping of sculptures, supplemented by a large wall text made of “falling” letters, conjures up the image of a song hanging frozen in mid-air. The central installation is surrounded by sparsely furnished spaces, featuring such objects and structures as a fireplace, tables and chairs, a bed, lamps and light switches as well as decorative moulding.

Wandering through these interiors we detect a remarkable attention to detail and to surfaces, as if the artist layered time over each of his objects. Their formal coherence is the result of an encounter Boyce made in 2005, when he discovered the Cubist concrete trees designed by the French twin brothers Jan and Joël Martel in 1925. Based on his studies of the Martel trees, Boyce developed an extensive modular system which he applies to lampshades, floor works, telephone booths, screens and all other kinds of sculptural objects. “When I need a new form, or wish to filter an existing form I look to the trees”, says Boyce, whose works are all touched by “this returning ghost”.

Furthermore, the works by Martin Boyce are held together by an even greater web of references informed by the ideas of early 20th century modernism. As with the concrete trees, Boyce takes up certain defunct objects, dissociates and reshuffles them, continuing to use them as a language that, though historic, cannot be silenced. By reducing objects like the plywood leg-splint by Charles and Ray Eames to their naked materiality, Boyce questions their received “message” and disengages them from their fixed cultural meaning. These pure forms are re-interpreted and “contaminated” by the artist with traces of use, with fictional, emotional, psychological layers, with a new “atmospheric dust”. These objects become his protagonists in surreal arrangements and emphatic installations that conjure up the moods of the “film noir”, New Wave and Post-Punk music, the language of abstraction and the functional structures of design and architecture. Martin Boyce is a delicate ‘arrangeur’, who merges all these influences and unstable fragments to form a sublime, touching and momentary whole, with surreal undertones and unforeseen relations between things from different times and contexts.

展览现场，马丁·博伊斯，空中花园，麓湖·A4美术馆，成都，中国，2018，致谢艺术家及麓湖·A4美术馆

Exhibition view, Martin Boyce, Hanging Gardens, LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2018, Courtesy the artist and LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum

展览现场（局部），马丁·博伊斯，空中花园，麓湖·A4美术馆，成都，中国，2018，致谢艺术家及麓湖·A4美术馆

Exhibition view(detail), Martin Boyce, Hanging Gardens, LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2018, Courtesy the artist and LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum

展览现场（局部），马丁·博伊斯，空中花园，麓湖·A4美术馆，成都，中国，2018，致谢艺术家及麓湖·A4美术馆

Exhibition view(detail), Martin Boyce, Hanging Gardens, LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China, 2018, Courtesy the artist and LUXELAKES·A4 Art Museum