Martin Boyce: The Stars Are Out

Opening on Friday, June 2, 2023, 6 – 9 pm
Artist talk with Martin Boyce and Christian Kobald, 7 – 8 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to present The Stars Are Out, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition with the Scottish artist Martin Boyce.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
 than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—William Shakespeare, Act 1 Scene 5, Hamlet

For his first solo exhibition in Vienna, the Glasgow-based, Turner Prize-winning (2011) artist Martin Boyce further elaborates on a reductive visual repertoire that consolidates aspects of architecture and design within the tenets of modernist production, repetition, and seriality. Consistently throughout his career, Boyce has used an economy of means to produce sculptural tableaux that distill and transform these structures into self-contained vessels of refinement. They underscore the shapes and patterns that surround us to the point of invisibility. With balletic precision, the twin poles of literary imagination and constructive pragmatism infuse Boyce with the power to distill the quintessence of an object. His playful material engagement with the components of high design belies his innovative solution to sculptural display in the manner of Carlo Scarpa, and Diego Giacometti, right on up to Wiener Werkstätte, and Franz West. In his installative stagings, form follows function; function segues into allegory suggesting a lapse in linear order. The minimal is there. Patterns intersect and repeat, unusual juxtapositions align, a low-tech logic ensues.