GLASGOW-based Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce has been chosen to kick off the 50th-anniversary celebrations of a major Scottish gallery.
The exhibition at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket includes a significant number of Boyce’s sculptures that have been shown internationally but never before at home.
“Scotland is a cultural hotbed and it is great to have artists like Martin who run successful international careers from their homes in Scotland,” said Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley.
Boyce last showed at the gallery in 1999 in a programme of exhibitions for early career Scottish artists titled Visions For The Future.
The new show brings together works from 1992 to the present in a celebration of Boyce’s art that offers the chance to explore the development of his artistic sensibility and sculptural language. It will be the artist’s first major show in his home country since 2002 at Tramway.
Born in Hamilton in 1967, Boyce studied at Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA in environmental art in 1990, then a MFA in 1997.
He won the Turner Prize in 2011 or his installation Do Words Have Voices and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.
Director Bradley said she was proud to bring Boyce’s work back to Scotland in a major exhibition which extends throughout the Fruitmarket and its Warehouse.
Rising to the challenge of making a new exhibition in a familiar place, Boyce has created a different atmosphere for each space.
First is an installation that uses the existing architecture of the gallery to create a new structure which is then used to display a series of wall-based art, from very early graphic text works to more recent painted panels.
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This leads on to a small room in which models and materials relating to Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s concrete Cubist “trees” from 1925 are shown on a specially adapted concrete table.
Boyce’s interest in these trees, the lexicon of shapes, patterns and typography he has developed from them, have been much discussed in essays on the artist’s work but never before laid out in an exhibition.
Next, Boyce re-imagines the familiar space of Fruitmarket’s Upper Gallery, with a number of works brought together in an atmospheric new combination.
From the immersive beauty of the very recent Future Blossom (For Yokeno Residence) to the subtly subversive interventions of the Ventilation Grills series, the works combine to make a magical, poetic space somewhere between inside and outside.
Finally, in the Warehouse, sculptures gather as though recently returned from – or about to go out on – exhibition.
Familiar works are shown in unfamiliar ways in this specially designed installation as Boyce plays with ideas of storage, granting viewers access to a part of the exhibition or art-making process that is not normally seen, and questioning how things slip into and out of mind and memory.
A new book is being made to celebrate the exhibition, with installation imagery and new writing from writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell and curators and writers Katrina Brown and Penelope Curtis.
The exhibition runs from now until June 9.
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