LONDON.- The Serpentine presents a major exhibition of new work by London-based artist Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK) who has been nominated for both the 2016 Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize.

Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery brings together work never before presented in London with new work in an installation that has been conceived specifically in relation to the Gallery. Combining sculpture, text and screen-printed paintings, Marten’s practice comprises images and objects, often playing with two and three-dimensionality. Her installations employ visual and linguistic ambiguity in order to explore the potential for misinterpretation and misunderstanding.

Marten’s sculptural installations often serve as repositories for disparate material combinations, resulting in an exhibition that calls into question our changing relationship to the readymade. Underscored by a process of collaged abstraction, her assemblages resonate with associative meaning. Creating a string of hieroglyphs or a kind of archaeological anagram, the work’sencrypted sequences are nevertheless driven by their own internal logic.

Helen Marten said: “I’m really interested in the point at which things become husked down to geometric memories of themselves, where a house, for instance, a pair of legs or a cat could be communicated with huge economy and speed via just a few lines. The vector can become a mechanism of delivery. As incorporated extensions, even a simple nod towards a shape that might be reminiscent of a readymade form is quite literally a vocaliser of external things – an agent of the world outside artmaking. And this is the point where you can use recognisable authority, the obstinate fact of a universally existent thing – an arm, a teapot, an alphabet – and extricate it from its own sense of intentionality.”

Showing concurrently at the Serpentine Gallery is the work of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz. Through the combination of diverse media, including sculpture, painting, film, photography and installation, Helen Marten and Marc Camille Chaimowicz create immersive environments that respond to the architecture of the Galleries and weave together fragmentary narratives in a non-linear manner. Both autumn exhibitions engage with the slippery nature of materials, distorting perceptions of familiar imagery and objects to explore the discrepancies between language and memory.

Helen Marten (born 1985, Macclesfield) lives and works in London. Marten studied at The Ruskin School, University of Oxford (2008) and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2005). She has had recent solo exhibitions at Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Museum Fridericianum, Germany; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Johann König, Berlin (all 2014); CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Chisenhale, London (2012-2013).

Marten was included in the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); the 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy and the 12th Lyon Biennale (both 2013). She was included the recent 20th Biennale Sydney, and has participated in group exhibitions at The Hirshhorn Musuem, Washington DC; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Kitchen, NYC; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo and MoMA PS1, NYC.

Marten received the LUMA Prize (2012) and the Prix Lafayette (2011). She is nominated for the 2016 Turner Prize as well as the forthcoming Hepworth Sculpture Prize.