Martin Boyce: All Over / Again / and Again
The Modern Institute, Glasgow
6 July - 31 August 2013
Review by Catrin Davies
2011 Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce’s beautifully fragmented exhibition neatly dovetails with Pernice’s orderly disorder. The shows, which run parallel to each other, are both compositionally sparse; both artists explore the boundaries between inside and out; and both work with building and outdoor materials in such a way that they bring a sense of lightness to them. Boyce’s exhibition is suspended with chains, there is cast jesmonite, mangled garden furniture and shuttered concrete, but there is also a sense of balance and space and clarity and, unexpectedly, a midcentury modern colour palette.
This marks Boyce’s fourth exhibition with The Modern Institute and sees him evolve some of the concepts he explored in another recent solo exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Titled ‘It’s Over / and Over’, that exhibition was similarly architectural in scope as Boyce created a territory that was hard to define as interior or exterior, and difficult to date as past, present or future. What connects these exhibitions is Boyce’s poetic sense of the middle ground and an occupation of the no man’s land between industrial and organic forms.
Here, Boyce has constructed a similarly abandoned, hybrid landscape which explores our relationship to environment and architecture, figuratively and literally knocking down the walls between outside and inside. ‘Eclipsed and Shuttered’ is a new series of work of jesmonite which is cast to appear like shuttered concrete to represent a neatly boarded-up window. Whether the blocked window stops you from looking out, or in, is up to you.
Industrial, derelict and yet somehow futuristic, the gallery space becomes a sparse, barren landscape populated with twisted metal, rusting chains and cast concrete’Those partially rusted steel chains are suspended above a concrete table like post-apocalyptic weeping willows. It’s the playground of the future, and of the past. It’s a midcentury modern Mad Max playground.
