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Martin Boyce
Martin Boyce is interested in the relationship between design and everyday life and in the particular role that design has in public consumption and popular culture. He concentrates on the utopian yearnings of past decades, representing them in a way which contrasts the desire of a better world that they reveal with more cynical actuality of their future: our present.When Now is Night is a wallpaper of a diagonal black linear grid, reminiscent of the façade of a glass modern office block, its frames printed in white. A grey linear tracery of shapes cuts across the black diamonds as if reflecting the distorted form of some other anonymous building. Wrapped around the walls of the gallery, it has the dark, dizzying thrill of the backdrops of a film noir.Fluorescent tubes possess a sense of both purity and menace. Hung close above the heads of visitor in the configuration of spider webs, they brightly illuminate the empty space with a cruel revealing light. Filling the air with the unpleasant hum of tedium, they remain strangely attractive with utilitarian beauty and directness of form.Our relationship to modernist design is further explored as what are now regarded as design classics of furniture are further distanced from their intended functionalism and mass consumerism. Embellished with the mantle of aesthetic desirability and exclusivity of taste these examples of mid-century modernist furniture are the rendered devoid of function by Boyce’s representation of them, except as objects/sculptures only to be gazed at.
Martin Boyce lives and works in Glasgow where he was born in 1967. He studied at Glasgow School of Art (1986-1990) and (1995-97) and California Institute of Arts (1997). He recently exhibited at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Vision for the Future, Part I with Ross Sinclair and will be included in the forthcoming British Art Show.
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