Martin Roth (artist)

Martin Roth (October 2, 1977 in Graz – June 14, 2019 in New York City^[1]) was an Austrian artist living and working in New York City, USA after earning a master's degree from Hunter College in 2011.

Work

Much of Roth's work revolved around the introduction of living organisms into a setting or situation circumscribed by the artist. He used living organisms as a stand in for humans, to show that they're also characters caught in conditions where they don't have control."^[2][3][4][3] His work, while frequently ephemeral or temporary,^[3] is saturated in space.^[5][4] On one level, there is the physical dimension of spaces large,^[6] and small: from the quaint miniature landscapes or rocks and plants inside glass cages,^[3][7] housing lizards^[8] or mice^[9] to the compact grid of a lavender field^{[10][11][12][13]} shaped by the artist's arrangement in a white cube; from the beautiful patterned garden of Persian rugs sprouting verdant grass,^[2][11][14] or the tepid lagoon created by flooding a gallery space,^[5][15][16] to the thrust of a cherry sapling through a laminate surface,^[3][17] demonstrating the interplay between an exposed space above and subterranean space^[18][19] below that characterizes several of Roth's installations.^[6] These physical settings often interweave with or generate acoustic spaces^[20][21][16] to create the conditions for – and are, in turn, shaped by – the natural organism that inhabit them.^[3][15] His work can be large-scale and particular to a site,^[3][10][9] the fact that it requires the nurture^[22] of living organisms^[3][13] renders it strangely intimate and invites the viewer if not to engage directly,^[23][16] at least to consider his or her relationship to the work on a human scale.^[24][3] Roth interrogated the increasingly blurry line between human and nonhuman systems.^[25]

References

External links

• Roth's official website

This page was last edited on 7 December 2022, at 12:22