Awarded Bernhard Martin

Young art from Germany. In past years, that has been a very effective marketing term for painting—not only from Leipzig. With the acceptance of figurative art, the vehement willingness to reject objectivity brought back old enemies who do not grow tired of proclaiming the death of painting.

„Linksverkehr“, 2007 

This is where Bernhard Martin comes in, who from time to time paints as if he would like to prepare an abrupt end for the genre and put it gently to rest itself. Born in 1966 in Hanover, Martin has been digging at painting since his youth. His canvases show a constant battle for the image. Between fine painting and gestural expressionism, airbrush and abstract smudging, he explores the absolute limits of all the medium’s possibilities and impossibilities—with both mastery and failure. Martin refers to himself as an ideaartist who is an inventor of artistic thoughts as much as he is a pickpocket of others’ ideas. “We find ourselves in a supermarket here and I am packing my cart full of stuff,” says Martin, who after a few years in Barcelona has lived in Berlin since the early 1990s, but will soon be pushing his shopping cart further into surrounding Brandenburg to develop his picture repertoire there. So painting will indeed live on. Now the city of Wolfsburg awarded him the prize for young art. Although Martin is already over forty, that shouldn’t baffle you. The criterion for the prize is not biological age but visual youthfulness. That was already the case for earlier prizewinners like Olaf Nicolai or Katharina Fritsch. Art is actually only as old as it feels!

Text > MW

Bernhard Martin, „Thema verfehlt“,
Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg,
11.29.2008 – 03.02.2009. Catalog
published by DuMont

www.staedtische-galerie-wolfsburg.de

„Earl Grey“, 2006  

First Picture > „Affentorplatz“, 2006

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