Jason Martin Polychrome Futures

The Buchmann Galerie is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jason Martin (b. 1970, UK).

Since February 2020, Jason Martin has dedicated himself to working on the preparation and development of this new series of paintings. This group of works marks an important shift in the artist’s practice: He returns to the paintbrush, but for the first time uses a versatile colour palette in different hues and tones to create paintings of immense depth and space.

Looking at the polychrome paintings one journeys into something that begins on the surface, but which then pulls you in deeper and deeper, opening into an unfathomable space beyond. One reaches a surprising, almost figurative reality inside the painting, much like looking into a blazing fire, swirling water or ice. The lateral movement of the brushwork supports the multi-layered play of colours in the more translucent paintings, while others retain an opaqueness.

In these paintings, Jason Martin decisively pushes the boundaries further. He expresses his view on the new works in a personal note:

“My new works realised throughout this exceptional 2020 will be my only solo exhibition this year with all works completed since February.

Some fundamental essentials in my practice prior to 2013 have now been revisited after a seven-year hiatus, the year I abandoned working with a brush.

Of course, a brush can have many identities and as a working tool can be shaped to meet specific ends especially when exploring the potential of an arm-led reach that expands typical perceived norms tracing scale and the relationship to the body.

My brushes often attempt a furthering of an extended linear striation or as I consider - The meta stroke.

A flow of gestural possibility that furthers pre-conceived and more familiar explorations in painterly gesture that in particular leave testimony to the extended reach of the body. Beginning with cubism the arm-led gesture signalled movement from the elbow. From here, albeit roughly forty years later, arm-led gestural abstraction transformed the story of the self-referential brush mark.

Post war American painting and the Mono-ha movement of South Korea and Japan each brought their own versions of later high Modernism. From the wrist to the elbow to the shoulder the investment of the body and the meta traces recorded through space and time have left this passage of painting’s history almost empty. 

This distilled vision has roots in the early modernist enquiry in how painting’s subject and narrative has been replaced by not WHAT to paint but HOW to paint. Breaking away from perspectival illusory space as would a topographical painter if depicting views of nature, I have continued to challenge where an imaginary space couples with an unmediated sensory stimulation.

I have always sought inventive ways to adapt and appropriate a singular gestural language that at times has been described as a mono language. New ways of looking, new ways to perceive space.

At the time I stopped using fibrous brushes my ambition had been to refrain from less playful and whimsical rhythms for a greater and more rigorous exploratory practice. 

Painting has its surprises and if successful awakens mysterious new thresholds.”

Works by Jason Martin are represented in many important private and public collections, including in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, the Schaufler Foundation Schauwerk Sindelfingen, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna.

Feel free to contact the gallery for any further information about the artist or images of the works.