Bernhard Martin Oeuvres Récentes

In the early 1940s, Francis Picabia was the first artist to copy trivial magazine pictures into his works on a large scale. He became the predecessor of a generation of artists socialized in the '80s, who countered the flood of media images by intensive sampling and painterly rendering of these images. 

In this context, Bernhard Martin attracts attention by his novel radicality: the most diverse imaginable pictorial worlds are combined in his works and, in the Surrealist tradition, entangled in interactions. In Martin's pictures, the individual forms are separated and thrown into extreme relief by their sharp contours. The user-interfaces of contemporary graphics programs are reflected in his works. The hybridity of the forms he uses is emphasized by their stylistic inhomogeneity: here photo-realistic segments are juxtaposed with gesturally expressive abstractions and two-dimensional airbrushed fields.

Bernhard Martin chronicles everyday life; his deliberate recourse to the most infantile things is typical. In his encyclopedic collection of such objects, however, he never denies the classical genres of art history, which remain identifiable as landscape, still life, genre and portrait. »I am interested in worlds, islands, rarities, biotopes, contrasts that clash – in short, everyday life« – thus Martin describes the intention of his works, which form a fascinating sub-system of real appearances.