Introduction

In conjunction with Berlin Gallery Weekend Johnen Galerie is showing the exhibition In Praise of Shadows with new works by the 2011 Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce.

Boyce's works consist of the complex, visual language of historical design objects, which he places in relation to the present. His works resemble melancholic, visual poems, whose vocabulary stems from architecture and modernism. 

Modernism has become a scene of highly ambivalent experiences, so that Boyce's works always touch on the question to what the extent have their hopes and dreams been passed on over the ears, having to be adapted to reality. For several years the highly abstracted concrete trees, created by the brothers Joel and Jan Martel in 1925 for a garden in Paris, have been the starting point for Martin Boyce. They can be seen as a symbol of the submission of nature to design. Boyce uses the geometric structures on which the trees are based as a starting point for objects as diverse as letters, lamps, screens, masks, leaves, grids or furniture. He creates sculptures, installations and spaces, where nature and architecture collapse and evoke a melancholic mood of decay and abandonment. In the murals and on the surfaces of the various objects, fragments of the geometric structures of the trees are arranged, which in turn form letters that are composed over the surface and can be read as poetic lines of text. It is also thanks to this poetry that Boyce's art does not remain in cold exactness, but involves and deeply touches the viewer through countless variations and associations. 

Martin Boyce (*1967) lives and works in Glasgow, where he attended the Glasgow School of Art until 1990. Solo exhibitions of his works include Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh (1999), MMK Frankfurt (2002), Tramway Glasgow (2002), Adolf Luther Prize, Krefeld (2004), Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva (2007), Scottish Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia (2009) and Turner Prize exhibition, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2011).