Martin Honert is a German sculptor whose fastidiously crafted works are largely inspired by childhood memories recalled from his own early drawings, schoolbooks, and family photographs. Employing illusion, manipulation of scale, and painstakingly rendered surfaces, they are obsessive depictions of essential ideas that connect to collective experiences. “I don’t want my work to get too personal. I may begin with a personal image, but then I try to see how I can formulate a more general one,” he has said. “I don’t want to tell stories, so I try to reduce the image to its purest state.”

Martin Honert (b. 1953) represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and had his first one-person exhibition in the United States in 1999, at Matthew Marks Gallery. In 2007 the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden mounted a retrospective, and his work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Honert lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dresden.