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6/9/2010

Kris Martin

White Cube, London

White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to announce 'Festum', an exhibition of new work by the Belgian artist Kris Martin. Taking the Latin for 'festival', Martin's work celebrates the ambiguity of the term, how it embodies our attitudes about both life and death, both jubilation and the fragility of our existence. At the entrance of the gallery stands a large empty 'Bell Jar' (2010), scaled-up to accommodate an adult figure. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, statues of Saints or other such venerated objects would be displayed in these jars. Here, with the absence of any such precious object, Martin questions how contemporary culture attributes value or significance not only to objects but also to individuals.

In the upstairs gallery is 'Festum' (2010), a group of figures zig-zag and undulate across the space, rather like bunting or the paper-chain figures that are used for decoration at children's parties. To create this festoon, Martin sourced over 200 metal Christ figurines from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, detached them from their original wooden crosses, and interlinked them using only nails through the stigmata on their hands. Festum points to society's readiness to reference and celebrate such religious events, while at the same time it offers a critique of the contemporary malaise regarding religious faith and doctrine.

Europe's Christian and iconological heritage is further addressed in another work featuring a golden niche, an objet trouvé that Martin found with the Madonna missing, leaving only a trace of gilding where the deity had originally been glued. 'Stabat Mater' (2010) takes its title from a hymn based on a medieval poem that meditates on Mary's grief at the crucifixion of Christ. The niche, now stripped of its Madonna, otherwise referred to as 'the sorrowful mother stood' or 'Stabat Mater dolorosa' highlights how for centuries much of contemporary Western culture has been abandoning Christian values and the belief in the existence of the divine.

Visitors to the ground floor gallery could be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled upon the debris from some kind of party. Covering the floor are thousands of copper bronze discs, smaller than a penny and so highly polished that they vary in colour according to the direction of the light, combining to create a kind of pointillist carpet. 'Festum II' (2010), is a playful take on the paper confetti that is often thrown at parties, gigs, carnivals or over a newly married couple. It marks the hiatus of the celebration and afterwards is left to be trodden on and disintegrate. Here the residue is ossified in punctured bronze discs that glimmer and shift as the visitor walks over them and gradually pushes the artwork underfoot out of the gallery as if to remind us of our own transience.

Kris Martin was born in 1972 in Kortrijk and is based in Ghent, Belgium. Martin has shown extensively with major group exhibitions including 'Traces du sacré', Centre Pompidou, Paris (2008), 'Passengers', Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2007), 'Learn to Read', Tate Modern, London (2007) and 'Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art' (2006). Solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2009), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2008), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2008), Galleria d`Arte Moderna e Contemporanea GAMeC, Bergamo (2008) and P.S.1, MoMA, New York (2007). Coinciding with this exhibition, Kris Martin will participate in 'Touched', Liverpool Biennial, 18 September - 28 November 2010.

For further information, please contact Honey Luard or Sara Macdonald on +44 (0)20 7930 5373.

Preview: 7 September 2010, 6-8pm

White Cube Hoxton Square
48 Hoxton Square, London
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm
free admission

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