Enrique Marty

Enrique Marty works a lot, driven by a kind of maniacal phantasy and by an obsession to depict ‘everything’ in his environment, or to ‘deal’ with it in a certain way. His oeuvre, consisting of paintings, video’s, watercolours and sculptures, reads as an exploration of the human soul through a recording of what people do and how they behave.

Marty’s paintings are mostly based on snapshots or video-stills of day-to-day moments in which the artist detects a hidden layer of existential meaning, of cruelness or ridiculousness - often situations in which normal people have either been asked to ‘act’ or behave like actors without knowing it. In other cases Marty uses found footage or unusual stories, or invents scenes and mixes them with obscene, surreal or humouristic imagination.
His sculptures are three-dimensional portraits based on moulds taken from real persons. They are without exaggeration a new form of sculpture, based on a recombination of puppet traditions, voodoo, and a deep understanding of the meaning of Western figurative sculpture. Being theatrical objects and sculptures at the same time, they also serve as tools with which the artist can control the psychology of the viewer, and structure the show.
In his video’s, Marty makes a mix based on different sources, a procedure similar to the one applied to the paintings. All of this results in a highly dramatic and vital oeuvre which – on a meta-level - can be seen as an encylopedia of human life and mentality. An oeuvre in which the audience discovers the dark side and magic of our so-called normal life.

Using all these different media, Marty constructs shows which can be read as mental spaces - a collection of thoughts and images, an archive of memories and mental snapshots by which life among friends and family is documented. Portraitdolls, walls filled with hundreds of paintings and video are often combined into total installations. Sometimes the structure of the exhibition even requires an architectural intervention, many times it is even built on special locations. Moreover, Marty often choses to modify the proportions of the space to make it match with the atmosphere of the show.
Rather than a ‘show’ in the traditional sense of the word, each exhibition is a try-out or an improvisation, an experimental association of themes, arranged according to a personal logic and related to content the artist is dealing with. Marty often gives way to his fascination for the dark side of our psychology, the kind of darkness we find in circusses or wedding parties. Within this mental frame, the impact of the works varies from devilish or ambiguous amusement, to shock or terror.
For Marty however, shocking - or amusing, for that matter - is a methods rather than a goal, although his work can be very shocking to any viewer who is not familiar with it, and even to those who do know it. The feelings and experiences the viewer has when undergoing the work cause a state of extreme awareness of what can’t be seen immediately, a fascination for life.

Importantly, Enrique Marty’s works are often based on an analysis of the characteristics of self-made images and mass-communication and our obsessive urge to reproduce and document our personal life. He often focuses on phenomena like the unlimited recording of experiences and the techniques of story-telling. Through a complex process of reworking and mixing visual content, seemingly without adding any clear significance, the highly personal is turned into a moment or an image with a universal appeal. Each event or image recorded by the artist - who deliberately acts as a ‘medium’ at this point - is turned into a work in any kind of medium. Then it is mixed with other images from the artist’s vast mental archive, or simply recombined with a previous work. Ultimately it becomes a sign of life, a universal testimony of someone else living a life as difficult, horrifying or pleasant as ours.

Short Biography

Enrique Marty was born in Salamanca in 1969. His unique signature drew a lot of attention in Spain and abroad, a.o. with a solo-show at the Reina Sofia Museum / Espacio Uno (2001) and with his much acclaimed solo-exhibition at the MUSAC (Léon, 2006). He took part in group shows at the Venice Biennial (2001 and 2005), at PS1 (New York, 2004), ZKM in Karlsruhe (2008), and many more. He was also one of the artists selected for a survey exhibition on Spanish art of the last 50 years in Palermo last year (‘Spain.1957-2007’, Palazzo Sant´Elia) and for ‘L´Art en Europe’ at Domaine Pommery (Reims, France, 2008).
Enrique Marty made his first appearance in Belgium with the solo show ‘Aim at the Brood’ at Deweer gallery in 2006. After ‘Dank and Dismal’ in 2009, Deweer gallery presented a third solo by the artist in March 2010, entitled ‘Sainte Guillotine’. Marty's recent institutional solo exhibitions include shows at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Netherlands, 2008) and at the Kunsthalle Mannheim (2010).