Fabian Marti

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Swiss artist Fabian Marti (*1979) for the fourth time in a large single exhibition. Marti was last shown as part of a group exhibition of three in the summer of 2012. Titling his exhibition “All is All” Fabian Marti now presents a new series of sculptures, wall pieces and photograms.

“All is All” – the spiritual idea of wholeness as diverseness of oneness, also understood as “All is One” – has long been a central idea to Marti's concept of art. Single units that combine to a unity, always caught in the act of becoming, without beginning or end – this not only describes the design of Marti's exhibitions, but also the relations and connections in form and content between individual works and even the artist's lifestyle:

“Between shaman and dandy, guru and bohemian, the romantic Fabian Marti has constructed a flexible and slightly antithetic artistic existence. His charisma fluctuates back and forth between an illuminated unveiling of truth and a hermetic somberness. The heavens open and close; the sun disappears and intensifies; truth comes and goes. 'Panta rhei, eveything flows', to summarize it with the most famous Heraclitean phrase.” (Rein Wolfs in: Fabian Marti. and then we mad & qiiyss nlff isssw myttl, Ed. Kunstverein Braunschweig & Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2012, p. 84)

Predominantly Marti's works deal with formalism, abstraction, and Op Art. Through the multifaceted layering of spiral, stripe and dotted patterns the objects and symbols acquire a hypnotic character that allows the viewers access to a secluded world. Shamanism, the engagement with the conscious and the expansion thereof in form of a temporal, spatial, spiritual and cultural borderline experiences are returning elements in Marti's body of work. He combines traditional handcraft and manual methods of artistic production with the newest technologies and mechanical reproduction techniques in a way that the former don’t suffer the loss of their directness.

Marti's sculptures – circular, sealed, and formed of horizontal, interlocking rings – are made of ceramic, concrete, or polyester – materials that could not be more different from each other. While the black and white striped ceramics extend the series “Philosophers and Shrinks” from 2011, Marti researches new production methods of casting with his concrete and polyester sculptures. The shapes are not created through physically forming the material, bur rather indirectly by pouring a prefabricated mold. Marti cuts through the alienation between artist and art object created by the reproducibility of these works by inserting hand-made elements such as silk-screen printed fabrics in the transparent polyester sculptures (see invitation card). In deviation to the permeable hollow molds of the ceramics and polyester, the concrete sculptures are solid, and, as their title indicates, filled with a specific, individual and non-reproducible, subjective and spherical content: “Capsule (Pain)”, “Capsule (Sex)” or “Capsule (Time)” (all 2014, concrete, 43 x 34 x 31 cm).

For the new wall pieces Marti used casting molds made of unbaked clay, which were washed off after being filled by the concrete, making the convex forms of finger- and handprints visible, along with the imprints of chains. “Unused Energy” (2014, metal, concrete, 121,5 x 85,5 x 3 cm), thus the title of the works, points to the handwriting of the artist, whose impressions are thus conserved in the concrete.

The works of the “Egg” series belong to the new photograms (all 2014, ink, silver gelatin print, 206 x 150, unique). They all show egg-shaped convergent circles in the center of the image – which at first appear to be the artist’s enlarged fingerprint. Above it red, blue, or violet colored clouds appear as microscopic views of molecular structures in a cryptic genesis. Using computer made stencils, Marti exposes the photo paper directly in sunlight, evoking a unique range of colors in the photographic process. The artist skillfully deploys the resulting blurs, dust particle and scratch marks as well as overexposures as an aesthetic component of the work. The ink color is applied afterwards, again in manual labor.