On Wednesday this week (March 6th) I will open the exhibit ‘Over the Edge’ at Artifact Gallery on 84 Orchard St in New York. The gallery has choosen around 18 prints, mostly etchings and a few dry points, from the last 12 years of production. The opening reception is at 6 PM – should you happen to be in the area!
I was invited by the gallerist Serge Gregorian one and a half year ago to have a show at his gallery, which then had the name ‘New Art Center’ and was in the 7th floor close to Times Square. Since then the gallery has moved to a ground floor space on Orchard Street in Lower East side i New York and is now named Artifact (www.artifactnyc.net)
This is my first presentation in the US with at complete exhibition and it’s of course going to be interesting to see the reaction of an american audience. In the press release the gallery writes:
Whether by inclusion of panoramic scenes of the Nordic landscape or through close-ups studies, Martin Due’s etchings have within them a holistic quality that overrides the particulars we see framed within the vision of each subject matter. There is a palpable and necessary condition of positive ambiguity and other-worldliness in the artist’s works which pervades each scene and which brings it to an exquisitely high level of intelligibility There is that intangible “more” at play in the artist’s work whose very aura of suggestiveness, so hard to pin down and express in words, is proof of its measure.
The artist writes: ”My theme and line of work have earlier often been the storytelling aspects of stone structures and eroding mountain landscapes – for me perceived as metaphors of time and an indefinite changing and recreative process. Sometimes I have worked with identifiable landscape motifs, but since the story of the landscape often is revealed both in the large formations just as well as in the tiny details of the fractured stone, I often have constructed pictures where the large form and the small detail can play together and comment each other.”
This pre-verbal apprehension of the world, this feeling – tone that pervades Due’s work is one in which the slow and hazy flow of time seems to be materialized through light. It is through the passage of the sun’s rays that the viewer understands Due’s meditative approach to his calling, which evokes the capturing of the sublime moment. Each image, seemingly placid and well directed to engage meditations on the sublimities of natural wonders. The viewer is left to ponder on the distinctions that are made between an image of glaciers and rocks as “nature” and the concept of an etched and sometimes colored landscape itself, an acculturated construct.
A Norwegian artist, through his etched descriptions encourages us to consider the “fugitive” Immateriality of the world. Paradoxically, it is the artist’s immersion within this immateriality, this grounding within the very stuff of life that sharpens his observational skills. The end result is a switching between different levels of reality, from the mundane to the exalted to the sublime and back. In his seeming determination to explore the extremes of the landscape, the artist becomes an extraordinary recorder of the ordinary gestures of nature.
For more information and visuals please contact ARTIFACT.