Martin Boyce: Before Behind Between Above Below: Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
Martin Boyce’s sculptures rework the textures and forms of the built environment. Using the iconography of the everyday alongside the formal and conceptual histories of art, architecture and design, Boyce creates poetic landscapes that merge interior and exterior spaces.
This exhibition extends throughout Fruitmarket, in the Exhibition Galleries and the Warehouse. It opens with an installation that uses our existing architecture to create a new structure in which to display a series of wall-based works – from very early graphic text works to more recent painted panels. This leads on to a small room in which models and materials relating to Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s 1925 concrete ‘trees’ are shown on a specially adapted concrete table. The lexicon of shapes, patterns and typography Boyce has developed from these trees have never before been 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 Future Blossom (For Yokeno Residence) to the subtly subversive interventions of the Ventilation Grill series, the works combine to make a magical place somewhere between inside and outside.
Finally, the Warehouse, where sculptures gather as though recently returned from or about to go out on exhibition. Familiar works are shown in unfamiliar ways as Boyce plays with ideas of storage, granting us 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.
Bringing together works from 1992 to the present – including a significant number of sculptures that have been shown internationally, but never before at home – it offers the chance to reflect on the artistic sensibility and sculptural language of one of the UK’s most significant artists.
Installation view, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 2024.
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
