Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce asks us to contemplate our place in the built environment with his current exhibition Before Behind Between Above Below, which kicks off Fruitmarket’s 50th Anniversary celebrations. A sense of cyclicality is induced, as Boyce has displayed at Fruitmarket before – in 1999 as part of a series of exhibitions entitled Visions for the Future, which had highlighted his work as a young artist to watch at the turn of the millennium. This cyclical narrative is advanced as the exhibition draws together various elements from Boyce’s career, with works dating back to 1992. Cyclicality is also present throughout the exhibition as themes of nature, industrialisation, the domestic, and memory, to name a few, reoccur and interconnect between rooms.
Interested in spaces that exist in limbo, Boyce’s exhibition is full of contrasts and contradictions. Familiar motifs are recast in new ways. His Turner Prize-winning concrete trees are a familiar presence throughout the exhibition, despite the new ways in which they have been installed. We see Boyce’s various iterations of them, including insight into the process behind them displayed in drawings on a ‘workman’s table’. Boyce sees the trees as ‘a perfect collapse of architecture and nature’, which is clearly articulated in the upper gallery-cum-apartment where Boyce has installed Future Blossom, a canopy of delicate, angular, pink and white aluminium forms which reflect light from the skylight above – the contrast between the natural and industrial; situated, as the gallery’s name would suggest, within the former fruit market, but also next to Waverley Station.
This duality reoccurs with the Alexander Calder-esque mobiles which draw to mind connotations of weeping willows. These mobiles hang in the converted Warehouse, emerging from before, behind, between, above, and below the ethereal curtains which have been hung to break up the space. The ethereal presence of the curtains is translated into Spook School, 2016, photos of the Glasgow School of Art, which Boyce has placed on a table in the centre of the space. He was allowed to enter and photograph the space before the second fire at the School, but even without the backstory these photos connote a mysterious presence, evoking considerations towards memory and loss. The mystery evoked is simultaneously contradicted as Boyce has reconstructed this space as his workshop, thus suggesting a sense of openness, we see the artist’s process.
Beyond Boyce’s metaphorical concepts questioning our sense of place, the words of the title are echoed around the galleries, in graphic prints and in works resembling ventilation grills, which surround Boyce’s conversion of the upper gallery into a New York apartment. However, traditional elements are subverted in this surreal reconstruction. A fireplace with a door inside, vents which it seems transfer messages from the telephones which hang in the gallery below. On initial entrance to the exhibition, we see a 1955 Arne Jacobsen chair propped against the door, entering the top-lit apartment it is as if you have managed to penetrate Boyce’s strange and surreal thoughts.
Boyce has spoken of his initial interest with patterns, and how new things can form from this repetition of shapes and forms. These thoughts stay with you throughout, as shapes and motifs reoccur, constantly forcing us to contemplate our place in the exhibition and wider environment: just as Boyce has reworked the space of the Fruitmarket, he asks us to reconstruct our own memories.
Boyce has worked with the gallery’s steel frames: each of the three of the exhibition spaces has been carefully considered. Whilst themes of memory, nature, the domestic and industrial are evident throughout, each space has its own distinct feel. An understanding of Boyce’s aims to provoke questions is helpful, however the exhibition has been left intentionally open with limited information to the exhibits other than the artwork titles. Therefore, Fruitmarket’s exhibition encourages an open-minded and individual approach.
As Boyce asks us to question how things slip in and out of mind and memory, one thing is for sure – this exhibition won’t. In an exhibition where memory and anticipation align and industrial sculptures are turned natural and domestic, I am left questioning not just my own place in the environment, but also what other exhibitions Fruitmarket’s 50th Anniversary has in store [to which Artmag.co.uk has the answer – click the link – Ed]
With thanks to Nelly Laycock for this review.
