Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery announces a new exhibition entitled The Perfect Kiss, featuring the work of Enrique Marty. This exhibition of paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and videos will be on view from September 11 through October 23, 2004, with an opening reception on September 10, from 6 to 8 pm.
Enrique Marty is one of Spain's most acclaimed young artists. Creating idiosyncratic scenarios through a diversity of media, Marty evokes powerful idioms that complicate idealized notions of family life and friendship. His works pose questions about the real and the fictional, and the plausibility of their separation.
Marty's practice is largely autobiographical. He summons his friends and family to partake in his creations, exploring topics ranging from love, sex, religion, and death.
Polaroids are often the source material for Marty's paintings, which he produces in rapid succession, as if to mimic the photographic process. To create the series of paintings on wood entitled Matar es facíl / Suicido en familia (Killing is Easy / Suicide in the Family), Marty asked friends to stage their own deaths by posing with a shotgun. The series Vergüenza, humillacíon... (Shame, Humiliation...) depicts nearly empty rooms, most of which include only a bed, a cross, and a bible. Even among these few possessions there are visible signs of disorder that suggest a human presence.
Marty's videos expose the latent desires and behavioral patterns that are revealed in deeply personal fragments of the artist's immediate surroundings. His characters are immersed in a world with no clear boundaries, making it impossible to decipher fact from fiction. In Super Woman Meets B Marty shows his mother in the corridors of her apartment, seemingly possessed and tortured by the simple act of cleaning her home. She looks up to the heavens as if beckoning a higher power, pleading for relief from the weight of existence. Dancing Girl is a humorous portrayal of a young girl that exposes the reality of evil beneath the veneer of childhood innocence.
The three sculptures in the exhibition - Padre (Father), Madre (Mother), and Vecina (Neighbor) - are surprisingly small in scale, accentuating the viewer's dominance. Standing passively, Marty's repugnant neighbor is depicted physically deformed by conjunctivitis and warts, as if these maladies represent her social anguish. Padre and Madre are representations of the artist's parents. Through careful attention to their attire and gestures Marty reflects on their social and familial discomforts.
Enrique Marty was born in Salamanca, Spain, where he lives and works today. Since graduating from the University of Salamanca in 1992, Marty has exhibited his work in Australia, Italy, and Spain, where he has had a one-person show at the Espacio Uno of the National Museum of Arts Reina Sofia.