Jed Martin: The Map is More Interesting than the Territory / Georgia Gardner Gray: Precious Provincials

The Kunstverein in Hamburg is delighted to present exhibitions by Jed Martin and Georgia Gardner Gray.

Jed Martin
The Map is More Interesting than the Territory

“I would love to be an artist / To recreate the world / To be an anarchist / To live like a millionaire!”

Jed Martin, born in 1975, is one of the most important contemporary French artists. With digitally manipulated Michelin street maps, he has already presented distanced reflection on the state of the world in his early work. In 2010, he increasingly turned to figurative painting. In this hitherto most productive phase, he created the Series of Simple Professions with which he achieved his international breakthrough. Today they are sold for top prices at auctions. The best-known picture of the series—not least due to his tragic story—is Michel Houellebecq, Writer, a portrait of the author of The Map and the Territory made just a few months before his decapitation by an art thief in spring of 2018. The value of the picture, which is now in private ownership again, is estimated at around 12 million euros after Houellebecq’s death.

The Deutsche SchauSpielHaus and the Kunstverein in Hamburg present works by the artist and celebrate him in a major retrospective consisting of a theatre play and an exhibition.

Cast: Lutz Bacher, Maya Deren, Iris Häussler, Christian Jankowski, Eva Kot’átková, Constantin Luser, Seb Patane & Black To Comm, Jochen Schmith, Stefan Vogel, Christopher Williams

Idea and concept: Anita Schmid, Christoph Luser
Curated by: Bettina Steinbrügge, Anita Schmid and Christoph Luser

The exhibition is realized with the friendly support of the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, and the Mara & Holger Cassens Stiftung.

Best & Boldest #2:
Georgia Gardner Gray 
Precious Provincials

In her first institutional solo show and as part of the ongoing series Best & Boldest #2, Georgia Gardner Gray (*1988, New York, USA, lives and works in Berlin) presents new mid- and large-format paintings and drawings. Like French playwright Molière, the artist plays with codes of behavior through the mannered characters in her iridescent paintings. In this series, her images show outsiders like punks and groupies gleefully performing their rebellious lifestyles. She toys with gender attributions, vice, and ambition: be it unsatisfied intellectuals, hungry street musicians or lonely hung over couples. Gardner Gray grasps that the rebellious attitude has been camouflaged in a society that has made constant change and experimental lifestyles the going standard. To find the grain means coping with the ambivalences between self-determination, attitude, and personal freedom.

Within the exhibition space, the works are staged around the narrative of a theater play, written by the artist and inspired by the comedy The Affected Young Ladies, by Molière. She tells the story of a tyrannical and at once brilliant young girl, set in an ordinary family home whose fixed norms and plain conventions she rebels against with her precociousness and wit. 

Curated by Anna Nowak

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, and the Leinemann Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst. 

Press contact: Anna Nowak, T +49 40 322158 / presse [​at​] kunstverein.de