Press Release

Bernhard Martin

Drawings

25/10 – 20/12/2003

Opening Saturday 25/10/2003, 12 – 8 pm

Recent solo exhibitons

2003 Recent Works, Thaddeus Ropac Gallery, Paris

Kindergarten, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York

2002 FIAC 2002 (Perspectives), Paris (Unlimited Contemporary Art, Athens)

Ich zeig Ihnen gerne meinen Nassbereich (Jokes), MAMCO, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva

2001 Soft Core, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Germany

Galerie Voges + Deisen, Frankfurt/ Main

P.S.1, New York

Recent group exhibitions

2003 My Way Home, Thaddeus Ropac Gallery, Salzburg, Austria (with Dexter Dalwood & Lisa Ruyter)

German Painting 2003, Kunstverein Frankfurt, Germany, cat.

Kunsthaus Glarous, Switzerland

2002 Dark Spring, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany (curated by Liam Gillick)

2001 Strictly Painting II, Galerie V+D, Frankfurt/ Main

I love Dijon, Nouvelles scenes, Le Consortium, Dijon, France

Tirana Biennale 1, Tirana, Albania

Over~, Unlimited Contemporary Art, Athens

Bernhard Martin’s work oscillates between painting, sculpture and installation, between seriousness and pleasure. He is less interested in virtuosity than in the mastery of techniques that he applies in order to commemorate meaningful stages in the history of painting and his personal experience.

It’s picture hoarding, a kind of vagabondism. I steal from everywhere – reproductions, television, internet – and I mix them up so that my work is ultimately neutral. I’m not interested in “ideas”. I am just combining things and techniques.

Using the technique of sampling with the appropriation, the juxtaposition of various pictural mediums and techniques (photorealistic elements, gesturally abstractions, two-dimensional airbrushed fields...) Bernhard Martin fractures the perspective of values in figurative painting, hence criticizes the perspective of values of the consumerist society and its relation with the human figure; Describing banal scenes from the everyday life, he adresses the constructed nature of leisure spaces or activities and the dichotomy between the mundane and the extraordinary. At the same time, his work becomes a site for contemplating the condition of alienation within modernity.

I am interested in worlds, islands, rarities, biotopes, contrasts that clash – in short, everyday life.

For his first solo exhibition in Athens, Bernhard Martin will present an ensemble of large new works on paper and a wall-drawing.

Unlimited Contemporary Art

Kriezi 1

GR- 10553 Athens

T/f 00 30 210 33 14 375

info@unlimitedcontemporary.com