Martin Boyce: WE MAKE AN UNSUBSTANTIAL TERRITORY: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present We Make an Unsubstantial Territory, an exhibition of new sculpture by Martin Boyce, and the artist's first solo show with the gallery. Creating groupings of works that simultaneously explore the poetic beauty and the potential menace of the urban landscape, Boyce transforms the gallery into "a place out of time," a space that recalls and references conventional public areas—the playground, the highway underpass, the parking lot—but seen sketchily, as though the viewer were able to enter and explore a fleeting memory, or a fuzzy snapshot.
Both the individual works and the presentation as a whole draw from and reference a photograph that Boyce found in a book on French Modernist gardens, an image of four concrete trees created by Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 "Exposition des Arts Décoratifs" in Paris. These trees, Boyce says, "represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature," and are emblematic of his ongoing exploration of the oppositional elements of contemporary urban existence: the natural versus the constructed, the populated versus the uninhabited, the old versus the new.
