Artist: Martin Boyce

Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents Celestial Snowdrops, its sixth solo exhibition of Scottish artist Martin Boyce in the dedicated showroom Galerie Eva Presenhuber x P21 in Seoul. This marks the second collaboration between the gallerists Eva Presenhuber and Soo Choi. It is Martin Boyce’s second solo exhibition in Korea.

Boyce uses a minimalist style to create sculptures that distill and transform everyday forms into refined, sculptural arrangements. His works draw attention to the often-unnoticed patterns and structures around us, combining literary imagination and constructive pragmatism with artistic precision. In Celestial Snowdrops, Boyce plays with different elements to create depth through unexpected juxtapositions of interior and exterior landscapes, illumination (and the lack of), woodblock printing, pasted street posters, and the stars.

The show is centered around the mobile The Weight of the Tides hanging from the ceiling. Boyce compares his mobile works to memory or dreams, where fragmented elements try to form a complete image but remain unstable, constantly shifting. His sculptural practice can be divided into two approaches: in one, sculptures are arranged in conversation to create large, immersive installations; in the other, entire landscapes are compressed into a single form. In The Weight of the Tides, the image of a Weeping Willow tree silhouetted against the moon conjures up an entire landscape within a single sculpture. Long chains evoke a sense of suspended time and melancholy, much like a paint drip might suggest a tear. Using an industrial palette of materials, the delicately painted, perforated ‘moon’ hangs near the Willow form, each dependent on the other. The tree’s long, chain-like branches hang close to the ground, amplifying gravity’s presence and imbuing the sculpture with a melancholic beauty.

This nocturnal melancholy is continued in three framed woodblock panels. Each woodblock bears a word – ‘Oceans’, ‘Falling’, ‘Always’ – forming a three-word poem. The woodblocks have been used to create prints that appear in seven mixed media assemblages presented in Boyce’s 2023 exhibition The Stars Are Out at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna, one of which – Celestial Snowdrops (2023) – gives the exhibition its title. These prints feature ‘stars’ made from holes drilled into blocks of plywood, where the absence of material, once inked and printed, creates the image of a starry sky. A cast bronze light switch within the work playfully references the act of turning the stars on and off. The juxtaposition of woodblock and print references Boyce’s exploration of minimalist painting, while revealing traces of the working process, although the inclusion of the woodblocks in the works ‘Oceans’, ‘Falling’, ‘Always’ signals that they can no longer be used for printing, like a photographic negative that has been destroyed.

This absence of illumination is also visible in Dead Star (yellow wall lamp) from 2015. The wall lamp, made from perforated steel, brass, and bronze looks functional but cannot actually produce light—the lamp holder is cast in bronze, making the piece purely sculptural and rendering it a ‘dead star,’ a light that no longer shines.

Martin Boyce was born 1967 in Hamilton, Scotland, UK, and lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Boyce was honored with the 2011 Turner Prize for his installation Do Words Have Voices, presented at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK. He represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international institutions including Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK (2024); Haubrok Foundation, Berlin, DE (2021); CONVENT Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent, BE (2019); Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, UK (2019); A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, CN (2018); Tate Britain, London, UK (2016); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, CH (2015); Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2015); Tramway, Glasgow, UK (2012); The Modern Institute, Atelier Hermes, Seoul, KR (2007); and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, DE (2002).