Jason Martin — New Titles

The Buchmann Galerie is delighted to present the exhibition New Titles by British painter Jason Martin (b. 1970 in Jersey, Channel Islands, UK) in both the main gallery and the Buchmann Box. The main gallery exhibition features a collection of Martin’s recent works that demonstrate his return to a more allegorical and lyrical sentiment, as noted in the artist’s reflections in preparation for the show.

Jason Martin is a painter who employs manifold methods of structuring paint to address the essential question of illusion and the rhetoric of space and plane in painting. Painting is also a performative act for him, leaving room for chance to create works that are lush, attractive and full of vigour.

The recent paintings assembled in the exhibition are characterised by a rhythm of constructive strokes that create a narrative of previous traces and an erasure of hidden, buried layers. As the artist elaborates on these works:

“A process of contingency, performance and necessity demonstrates through any given work here, that each is considered in its totality and asks to be afforded a faith in abandon commiserate to a marathon of false starts.” He continues: “These paintings are all by virtue, if evident by the viewer, moments of blind painted doubts. To see is to recognise and to possess meaning by default is to proclaim truth of consciousness step by qualified step.”

The exhibition gravitates around two new large works, Exile and The Whole Storm which mark two different aspects of the artist’s practice. While the large scale work Exile praises painting in its pure materiality in an all-over exegesis, the work The Whole Storm resembles an extremely abstract seascape, a whipped-up sea. This lush, painterly, complex and visually rich work produces exactly that notion of the sublime that Immanuel Kant describes in his Critique of Judgment as the aesthetic experience opposed to the simply beautiful. If one follows Kant, judging something sublime is a judgment that is beyond the limits of comprehension. This is exactly what painting can provide us with in our post-factual times. Jason Martin ends the notes accompany his exhibition with a striking sentence:

“Painting is a lust for the temperance of guile, grace and gravity.”

And so the paintings by Jason Martin are an exercise in contingency, performance and necessity, where each work needs to be considered in its totality. He aims to create an experience that is both subject and sensation, inviting the viewer to become complicit in the grandeur of his paintings.

The most recent group of works titled Resins shown at the Buchmann Box explores the relationship between surface and image carrier in a surprising materiality. The softly luminous works, which oscillate between sculpture and painting, captivate with their sensual quality.

The works are executed as casts in a sculptural process, the translucent synthetic resin concealing inlaid dichroic foils. These foils, textured and wrinkled by the artist during the casting process, refract light like a prism, creating an illusion of iridescent colour.

In these works, Martin continues to explore his major life theme – the material nature of painting with its history of illusionism and representation – this time through an investigation of the immaterial quality of space and colour.

Jason Martin has a BA from Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a participant in the legendary 1997 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy in London and the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The Buchmann Galerie presented Jason Martin for the first time in 2018, this being the artist’s first solo exhibition in a gallery in Germany. He lives and works in London and South Portugal.

Jason Martin’s work is held in international private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna and the Schaufler Foundation Schauwerk Sindelfingen.

For further information about Jason Martin and the exhibition, as well as for images, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery.