Opening on Saturday there is a new exhibition at Fruitmarket with works dating from 1993 to the present day created by Turner Prize winning artist, Glaswegian Martin Boyce.
The artist has not exhibited in Fruitmarket since 1999 when his work was included in Visions for the Future celebrating young artists, and now his exhibition over three rooms opens the 50th anniversary programme. Since then he has gone on to have great success with his work.
Primarily a sculptor Boyce also works with wall-based works which form the basis of the exhibition in the downstairs space. He said: “I wanted to focus on those pieces in this space whereas upstairs we have created a new constellation with a number of works never shown together before. In that way we have created a new landscape, a new environment, a new installation. The upstairs room will probably never exist in that way again except for these couple of months in Edinburgh.”
The gallery has gathered work from all over the world to make up the display. In the first set of rooms by the book shop there are wall based works including a chair which has been jammed under a door handle and Martin was keen to show us this work in particular. He said that in the same year as the last exhibition at Fruitmarket he and other artists were commissioned to create furniture pieces by a furniture company. The chair he designed then is shown in a photo but the newer chair is a sculpture and literally is a chair jammed up against a door handle.
Martin explained: “The chair was designed with the sole purpose of wedging a door closed. If you picture a cinematic moment, a film noir moment with someone being chased or they are under a threat, and they take a chair and wedge it under the door handle. I was interested in this misuse or other uses for furniture. Then come 2021 living in a different place with different politics, Trump and his questions of contested borders and isolationist politics, this idea of jamming yourself in or keeping other people out somehow became relevant again. So I made a new series of these chairs with a door behind. The back of the chair is expendable so that it becomes like a tool or a piece of hardware.”
Martin said: “The ceiling piece upstairs was shown in 2022 in a museum in Toronto and the floor sculpture has been shown in New York which is where it has come from. The fireplace has been exhibited in Zurich. This is an exhibition of which about 80% of the work has never been seen in the UK.”
Fruitmarket lends itself beautifully to the exhibition but in particular the ceiling piece which could almost be a site specific work.
In the Warehouse (the area past the café) the sculptures gather as though recently returned from or about to go out on show. Boyce plays here with the ideas of storage granting access to a part of the exhibition or art making process which is not normally seen.
A book will accompany the exhibition and he also expects to do an artist’s talk before it ends in June.
Martin Boyce was born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire in 1967. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA in environmental art in 1990, then a MFA in 1997. He lives in Glasgow. Boyce won the Turner Prize in 2011 and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.Â
Martin Boyce
Before Behind Between Above Below
02.03.24–09.06.24
Fruitmarket, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1DF. Free. fruitmarket.co.ukÂ
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