Alexey Martins
From the "Ghosts" series
About the Item
Digital sculptures from the "Ghosts" series (Ghost 2 black, Ghost 2 blue, Ghost 2 purple) continue the like-named series by Alexey Martins. The "Ghosts" are black zoomorphic figures constructed from various pieces of different lengths. The figures create an intense form with a barely visible border. These peculiar creatures are permanent inhabitants of Alexey Martins's latest installations. While they uniquely fit into each new work narrative, "ghosts" have their own conceptual line. "Vibrant Matter", a metaphor by an American political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett, has inspired the artist to create these beings. In her book of the same name, she describes the concept of vitalistic materialism that erases any border between living and inanimate matter. After all, modern views on the world imply that any material, even that seems most inert, has the power to act somehow, meaning that it affects the surrounding matter on a biological, chemical, and physical level. This is the point of view with no hierarchy between the stone, a human body, or the apple core rotting in landfills. All elements are interconnected, forming a single fluid, vibrant life. Bennett, through the metaphor of vibrant matter, creates a project for political ecology. Alexey Martins intentions as an artist are to translate ecological perception through a sculpture.
About the Artist
Alexey Martins has graduated from the Faculty of Painting of the Krasnoyarsk Art School and the Free Workshops Contemporary Art School of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In his practice, Martins engages with a distinctive set of materials, techniques and subjects that reveal the dynamic tension between civilization and nature. Out of old, reclaimed wooden planks, which still preserve the memory of wild forest and the warmth of a dwelling, he assembles striking and enigmatic zoomorphic sculptures. Using acrylic and graphite pencil, he creates concise monochromatic compositions, wherein the traces of anthropocentric landscape dissolve into the “snowy” whiteness of unfilled background. Martins considers all of his works in different media, including the ones produced for public spaces, as inherently connected parts of a single social and aesthetic project – a meditation on ecologic cataclysms, the ambivalent status of a human being in the system of organic life, regional identity and the unifying potential of art.
In 2015, Martins got onto the short list of the Kandinsky Prize in the nomination “Young Artist. Project of the Year” for his joint performance with the artist Igor Lazarev How to Talk about Art to the Siberian City. In 2017, Alexey Martins became the winner of the annual Ruinart Art Patronat Award Contest in the field of contemporary art.
