No Reflections
Martin Boyce
DCA welcomes visual artist Martin Boyce when his exhibition No Reflections returns to Scotland on 12th December following its run at the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, the worlds largest and most prestigious showcase for contemporary visual arts.
Curated by DCA for Scotland and Venice - a partnership between the Scottish Arts Council, National Galleries of Scotland and the British Council - the exhibition builds on the critical success of previous projects which have promoted artists including Turner Prize winner Simon Starling and Turner Prize nominees, Cathy Wilkes and Jim Lambie.
Martin Boyces lyrical installation of newly commissioned work for seven interconnected rooms in a 15th century Venetian Palazzo imagined the space as an abandoned garden, introducing into the fading grandeur of the palace groupings of works suspended aluminium trees, scattered wax paper leaves, raised stepping stones, a wooden bird box, tables and benches. Setting out to delve into the citys interior landscape Boyce conflated the internal and external, creating a heightened sense of displacement and abandonment. On its return to Dundee the work has been configured to work within DCAs more modern, formal exhibition spaces and offers a chance to revisit this work that was described by the Scotland on Sunday as muscular and supremely confident, its heavy and rusting materials hard-edged and brutal. It's a classic example of restraint being a form of strength.
The concept for No Reflections makes reference to a starting point in Boyces work - a photograph of four concrete trees created by Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. These trees, Boyce says, represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature, visualising oppositional elements of urban existence: the natural versus the constructed, the populated versus the uninhabited, old versus new.
For documentation of the exhibition in Venice see this section on our website
Art Review covers No Reflections at DCA.
All works courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Johnen Galerie, Berlin
Photography by Gilmar Ribeiro
Video by Schedule D productions