PROVIDENCE, RI.- The RISD Museum presents the first solo exhibition at an American museum by Scottish artist Martin Boyce, whose sculptural works and installations incorporate or evoke elements of modernist art and design, cinema, and organic forms to prompt a reconsideration of how we experience our built environment and the natural world. Martin Boyce: When Now is Night opened with a free celebration on Thursday evening, October 1. The exhibition is on view Friday, October 2, 2015, through Sunday, January 31, 2016.
John W. Smith, Director of the RISD Museum, says, “We are deeply privileged to present this important survey of Martin Boyce’s powerful work. His thoughtful observations on the intersections of art and design, the tension between our natural and man-made environments, and his multidisciplinary approach to art making feels very much at home within the RISD Museum, and we look forward to sharing Martin’s work with our students, faculty, and broader community.”
This survey exhibition of one of the foremost figures in contemporary art offers a focused yet comprehensive understanding of the development of Boyce’s career, beginning with a rarely exhibited group of early photographs, Interiors (1992), and extending through key elements of his installation for the Scottish pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale and up to his present-day production.
“A highlight of the exhibition is a reconstruction of Martin Boyce’s major, two-part installation When Now Is Night (2002), comprising a suspended web of fluorescent lights and grid-patterned wallpaper that characterize the modern city as a place charged alternately by wonder and anxiety,” says Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art for the RISD Museum. “This work, as well as a selection of the distinctive mask-based works that he has created throughout his career, evokes such themes as the urban landscape and the influence of the darkly psychological sensibility of film noir.”
Martin Boyce (born 1967, Scotland) is known for his sculptures, photographs, and large installations that poetically investigate the intersections between art, architecture, design, culture, and nature. The Turner Prize-winning artist describes his work as reflecting an interest in the psychological experience of space, abandoned or abject terrains, and the material manifestations of time. Borrowing the forms of objects found in indoor and outdoor settings—trees, benches, phone booths, ventilation grills, trash bins—Boyce reduces, skews, and abstracts these shapes into familiar but not immediately recognizable shapes. His recurring motifs include wire fences, glyphlike shapes, and alternating use of flowing curves or angular geometry.
Boyce studied at both the Glasgow School of Art and California Institute for the Arts. His work has been exhibited widely across the world, including solo exhibitions at Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt, 2002), Tate Britain (London, 2006), the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève (Geneva, Switzerland, 2007), and the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2015), among others. In 2009, Boyce represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled No Reflections. In 2011, he installed a major commission at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Through Layers and Leaves (Closer and Closer), part of the permanent sculpture program. When Now is Night , at the RISD Museum, is his first solo exhibition at an American museum. Boyce lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
