Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Martin Honert, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition, Honert’s second one-person show in the United States, will include seven large-scale sculptures which are being shown in this country for the first time.

Martin Honert often draws on childhood memories for his work. In his most recent sculpture, Honert focuses on drawings he made between the ages of eight and ten. These drawings serve as detailed guidelines for large-scale installations, translated into new and often technically difficult sculptural form. read more

In Santa Claus, Honert translates a drawing’s simple pencil lines into a golden three-dimensional sculpture of Santa Claus and his sack of gifts, advised by an evil figure on his shoulder. With Ghosts, Honert brings to life a small line drawing, using projectors with motion attachments to create optical effects that animate the small figures, causing them to rotate, waver, and change color. Gang is a nine-foot installation of a bicycle, four figures, and a larger-than-life sculpture of "Martin" as their leader, all clad in brightly-colored children’s clothing. Knight’s Battle is an installation of four stylized knights in armor, five soldiers, a horse, and a cannon ball being fired from a cannon, complete with a translucent cloud of smoke.

Also included will be two of Honert’s most important earlier works. Lantern, 2000, originally shown at Expo 2000 in Hannover, is a 10-foot square lightbox, each side of the box displaying an image of the artist in his bed gazing up at the night sky, thickly outlined in black, recalling the leading of stained-glass windows. Mirage, 1996, is a two-part sculpture based on a photograph of the artist as a child, building a sandcastle on a beach. Honert describes the work as “an attempt to turn an impalpable, immaterial form into a solid one.” This beautiful work consists of a image of a boy and an imaginary city on transparent film hung vertically in space above the remains of a sandcastle.

Martin Honert (b. 1953) lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dresden. He graduated from the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, studying in the same class as Thomas Struth, Katharina Fritsch, Thomas Schütte, and Andreas Gursky. The artist represented Germany in the 1995 Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions at the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; the Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Bourges.

Rarely exhibited in this country, Honert’s work is characterized by meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail, and as such the artist has completed a very limited number of works. This exhibition, consisting of seven sculptures, is among the largest of his career and will be accompanied by a catalogue raisonné reproducing all 46 works completed by the artist since 1982 as well as texts by the artist and an essay by Boris Groys.

Martin Honert will be on view at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues) through April 24th, 2004. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM.