Martin Boyce

A Forest (I), 2009

Martin Boyce has been developing a creative inventory for his solo shows and exhibition contributions since about 2002, and this involves condensing scenes he has experienced or imagined down into atmospherically charged sign constellations: tree structures made up of simple wood, neon or structurally abstracted crowns of trees. He constantly recombines his sculptural alphabet to form new constellations. Suspended from the ceiling and alluded like Venetian glass chandeliers, Forest I-III, 2009, functioned in his contribution to the Venice Biennale 2009 as a recurrent integrative element. These sculptures were based on photographs of the ‘Concrete Trees’ created in 1925 by the brothers Joël and Jan Martel for the ‘Exposition des Arts Décoratifs’ in Paris: “They represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature – visualizing oppositional elements of urban existence: the natural versus the constructed, the populated versus the uninhabited, old versus new.” (M.B.)