Martin Boyce

Can my sculptures dream? As amazing as this question might sound, Martin Boyce goes one step further, by asking for example »whether sculptures are equipped with artificial intelligence like the replicants in the film Blade ­Runner or whether they take on a life of their own by virtue of  their very conception and realisation«. Questions like this take us into the heart of a surprising sculptural universe comprising a cuboid ­alphabet of pentagonal forms for a complex modular system that ­Martin Boyce (born 1967 in ­Glasgow and lives there) has been developing since 2005. After the chance finding of a photograph taken in 1925 of a tree sculpture made from concrete by the brothers Joël and Jan Martel, ­Martin Boyce began creating the shapes comprising lampshades and floor sculptures, outdoor sculptures or telephone booths. »I cut out components of the trees lying flat on my desk and began to develop ­a linear repeat pattern with the central structure of the trees as the main motif. Over time I then began to notice the possibility of letters hidden within the lines of the repeat.« And it isn’t just this regularity which informs his work and to which the success of Martin Boyce’s highly distinctive sculp­tures can be attributed, but rather his ability to create, by use of simple means and also obvious to a wider audience, an almost symbiotic splicing of public and interior space, of abstract sculpture and ­nature, to which his installation from 2009 at the Venice Biennale in a venetian palazzo testifies. It may well be that Martin Boyce owes for this the Turner Prize 2011 first and foremost to such a ­touching approach.