(born in London in 1970)
Untitled, 2008, oil on steel, 236 x 354 x 11 cm

Provenance:
Thomas Olbricht Collection, Essen
Van Ham, Cologne, 26 September 2020, lot 333 –
acquired there by the former owner
Dorotheum Vienna, 30 November 2022, lot 274 - acquired from the above by the present owner

Exhibited:
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Zwei Sammler: Thomas Olbricht und Harald Falckenberg, 24 June - 21 August 2011, exh. cat. p. 52 (ed. by Dirk Luckow)

The British artist Jason Martin expands the possibilities of painting with his innovative approach in using unusual materials which serve as paint. He attracted international attention with his large, brushed oil paintings, executed in thin layers of paint with self-made comb-like tools – such as the one being auctioned off. Because of the light bouncing off the shiny surface, experiencing the work in person is like walking towards a sculpture rather than a painting.

„There’s never really any single point to review the work or to experience the work, it’s about moving around. But there is a stillness as well, in that the organisation of the marks all collide into a central or suggested central point. […] When you encounter a work of mine, there is an academic approach to the performative act, the gestural act. I have a series of reduced movements that then compile in a composition.

And you also look through it, because there is this implied sense of looking through, this illusion. […] I would suggest that my paintings are a hybrid between that naturalism, that looking through, that perspectival space, that implied pictorial depth and the didactic, academic concerns of abstraction, which are for me physical and arm-led, or I immerse my body into the whole making of the work. And they sit very much in between these two places, these two worlds. [...]”

Jason Martin on the exhibition: Convergence. Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul Fort Hill, 24.2.-16.4.22

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