Chris Martin
Staring into the Sun
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Poster, Chris Martin – Staring into the Sun
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2011
The Kunsthalle presents the American painter Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington D.C.) with his first institutional solo exhibition outside the United States. Since the mid-1990s, Martin has repeatedly paid tribute to fellow artists and musicians he admires, at times — as with Michael Jackson, James Brown or Frank Moore — on the occasion of their deaths. Such dedications ground Martin’s large-scale compositions in a social frame of reference while breaking with every purity code of colour-field and monochrome painting: names sit bluntly and roughly within the pictorial space, alongside glued-on coins, records, banana peels and newspaper clippings. Despite their rough, thoroughly profane surfaces, Martin’s works have, for over 30 years, drawn on lineages of spiritual abstraction, for which New York, where Martin has lived since 1975, served as a melting pot.
The exhibition focuses in particular on Martin’s early work, shown here in unprecedented scope, including the Black Paintings — black monochromes in which a few white lines suggest the illusion of space. Alongside these, the exhibition presents small, colourful canvases drawing on Christian mysticism, anthroposophical symbols, and the Spiritual Landscapes of North American Romanticism. The three-panel painting Staring into the Sun, created for Düsseldorf, extends from the wall onto the floor, revealing Martin’s fascination with scale and proportion in relation to the human body. The exhibition itself likewise extends into the outdoor space.
Please find here the publication of the exhibition.
Please find here the catalogue of the exhibition.
