October 10, 2014–February 1, 2015
Domus Artium (DA2)
Avenida de la Aldehuela, s/n
Salamanca 37003
Spain
Curator: Paco Barragán
Enrique Marty: Group Therapy, Act of Faith, Dark Room at Domus Artium (DA2) is the first comprehensive mid-career show of Spanish artist Enrique Marty (b. 1969, Salamanca). The scope of the exhibition curated by Paco Barragán, taking up the entire ground floor of the museum, is defined not only by the quantity of works shown or the diversity of artistic languages displayed, but also by the ambition to present and understand the artist’s oeuvre in its totality: from the earliest “amateur” works from his childhood and adolescence, through his first works as a young artist from the nineties, to his most recent production, including an important number of new works carried out especially for this show. Enrique Marty: Group Therapy, Act of Faith, Dark Room thus brings together a varied and complex body of work—consisting of painting, watercolor, photography, video, sculpture and installation—by an exceptionally prolific artist whose leitmotif is the critical reflection upon the anguished experiences of the contemporary subject in an unstable, ambiguous and contradictory world.
Paco Barragán: “Marty obliges us to remember that modernity’s grand narratives of secularization, individualization and independence of the contemporary subject have inevitably turned the same subject into an individualistic, solitary, egocentric, violent, unstable, and insecure being. In Marty’s work, we discover the other side of modernity: the codes of the rude, the obscene and the indecent, the sinister and the abject, the superstitious, the ‘unheimlich’ and the grotesque, the voyeur and the ordinary.
It is through the concept of the ordinary—in its double meaning in Spanish: the quotidian and customary, but also the low and despicable—that Enrique Marty filters an uncompromising analysis of the relationships, beliefs, and obsessions of the contemporary subject. But Marty achieves more: he also looks at this ordinary world—pervaded as it is with sex, pain, rage, violence, hate and fear—through the eyes of the victim, the oppressed, and the ‘other.’”
A first grand-scale attempt to reveal all these narratives, this show presents Enrique Marty’s “world” as a “rhizomatic” model-in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. In the first section of the show, titled Group Therapy, the focus is on works in which Marty analyzes the complex relationships of subjection, domination and even exploitation between human individuals through which they constitute themselves as subject, and the economy of those power relationships imposed on us by institutions like the “family,” “friends” or the “other.”
Act of Faith, the second section, presents a series of works that basically deal with beliefs, convictions, religious feelings, or phantasmagorias. Although Western society has become more and more secularized, the contemporary subject needs to believe, and we are experiencing a return to religion, or at least to a kind of diffused spirituality.
In the third section, referred to as Dark Room, Marty’s ideas on Freud, Artaud, Foucault and especially Nietzsche generate a vibrant dialogue that delves into the unconscious, but also into the realms of the repressed, dominated by obsessions, fear, megalomania and illusions of power.
The show at DA2 coincides with two other solo projects by the artist. At the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, curator Rafael Doctor started up an experimental series of dialogues between Spanish contemporary artists and the collection. With Reinterpretada I, the first to be invited was Enrique Marty. And A house can be a lethal weapon, Enrique Marty’s intervention in the Atelier Bouwmeester in Brussels, is a spatial and conceptual invasion of the Atelier that links his work with the debate on the importance of quality control.
Enrique Marty is represented by Deweer Gallery: www.deweergallery.com
Reinterpretada: Enrique Marty
Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid, Spain
September 27, 2014–January 1, 2015
Opening: September 26
www.flg.es
Enrique Marty: A house can be a lethal weapon
Atelier Bouwmeester, Brussels, Belgium
Opening: October 1
www.vlaamsbouwmeester.be
