Introduction
Hanging Gardens is an extensive exhibition by Martin Boyce, which encompasses over 30 works dating from 2004 to 2018. Boyce creates a poetic and fragmented landscape that moves between an abandoned urban park, a garden and an inner courtyard with close-by domestic quarters, instilling it with a sense of uncanny abandonment whilst also appearing familiar. The Glasgow-based artist captures the spirit of modernity, drawing on elements of architecture, design and early 20th century art as well as alluding to poetry, nature, film noir and post-punk music. By focusing on the origins of objects and forms, he explores how the basic ideas of Western modernism has transformed over time. Boyce keeps these ghosts alive, his scenes evoking a feeling of witnessing the traces of a human presence; the remnants of an imagined utopia, now deteriorated and detached from their former existence.