MANNHEIM.- “Premiere” is the name that Kunsthalle Mannheim has given its new exhibition format dedicated to current international trends in contemporary art. The start is made by Enrique Marty, one of the shooting stars of the Spanish art scene. On Friday, November 26, it was “curtains up!” for Premiere_1: ENRIQUE MARTY, an exhibition debut in two senses: It is also the Spaniard’s first solo show at a museum in Germany.

Dozens of clones all bearing the face of the artist assemble to form a space-filling army of fanatics, rowed up in an apathetic and irritated, ecstatic and panicky, hurt and ailing manner, like in a crusade. They all appear to be under the control of an idea, a conviction or a foreign power. With eighty individual sculptures, the installation “Fanatics” is at the centre of the exhibition, surrounded by a wall painting created especially for the Kunsthalle.

Eerie beings and mysterious creatures also populate the studio of Enrique Marty (*1969), who has already made a name for himself internationally with his disturbing, multimedia mise-enscènes. His art, for which he freely composes and flexibly stages
sculpture, painting and video, manoeuvres along the limits of what is aesthetically tolerable. Vacillating between attraction and repulsion, loathing and empathy, his work reconnoitres the abysses of the human soul.

Marty’s art is based on his own snapshots or pictures drawn from the Internet. He takes impressions of real persons and reduces them in size for his sculptures. The ecstatic gestures of his figures are reminiscent of the Spanish iconographic tradition with its grotesque medieval altarpieces and enraptured Baroque sculptures.

Kunsthalle Mannheim presents the entire range of the young Spaniard’s cross-genre forms of expression, which are always juxtaposed in an equal manner. Marty will leave his mark at several locations in the museum: with five recent small- and largeformat works publicly on view for the first time in this context.

Enrique Marty was born in 1969 in Salamanca, where he lives and works today. His first solo exhibition, “La Familia”, at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2000) already attracted great attention. It was followed by the large-scale, site-specific project “Flaschengeist” at MUSAC in Léon (2005). He became well-known abroad with his solo show at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague (2008) and his contributions to the Biennale in Venice in 2001 and 2005, PS 1 (New York) 2004 or ZKM (Karlsruhe) 2008. Marty is also engaged in theatre projects and works as a set designer.