ART-PRESENTATION: Kris Martin

Kris Martin belongs to the most important representatives of Contemporary Conceptual Art from Belgium. Working with different Media such as drawing, photography, collage, objects or Ready-made, Kris Martin’s work is characterized by its sensuous dimension. The artist often uses pre-codified material as a starting point, minimally transforming it so that the elements lose their original function.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: König Galerie Archive

Kris Martin’s sculptures, photographs, and installations that reflect his preoccupation with the great themes of human existence and its contradictions are on exhibition at König Galerie. The artist often works with found materials, making minor alterations or additions to effect shifts of meaning, modifications that charge the objects with narrative as well as metaphorical potential. “Ad Valvas”, for example, consists of a bronze cast of a notice board once situated outside a church. Here, however, it is empty, the object’s uselessness is emphasized by its transformation into a precious material. The conceptual rigor of creations such as “Ad Valvas” is crucial to the quietly haunting quality of Kris Martin’s work, which leaves a powerful and lasting impression on the viewer. A similar effect is palpable in “One Year”, for which the artist blended over a hundred individual shots of burning candles taken over the course of a year into a single photographic image, the superimposition of picture upon picture has eventually blurred the motif beyond recognition, resulting in an apparition of pure light. “Cross” spotlights a much more earthly concern. Martin cut ordinary crossword puzzles out of newspapers but forwent the clues to be solved and instead entered the one answer that, to his mind, always fits: he filled the rows and columns with repetitions of a single unchanging word in black pen, “Idiot,” an allusion to the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Strikingly simple and highly complex at the same time, the piece reprises the prominent “Idiot” series Martin began in 2005, in which he offered humorous reflections on the artist’s role in society and, by extension, a speculative meditation on the fundamental questions of human existence.

Info: König Galerie, St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstr. 118-121, Berlin, Duration: 15/7-14/9/16, Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.koeniggalerie.com