Turner Prize winning Scottish artist Martin Boyce opens Fruitmarket celebrations

Turner Prize winning Scottish artist Martin Boyce is opening a new exhibition in Edinburgh, to celebrate the Fruitmarket’s 50th anniversary. 

The Glasgow based artist’s sculptures rework the textures and forms of the built environment. Using the iconography of the everyday he creates poetic landscapes which merge interior and exterior spaces.

Boyce last showed at Fruitmarket in 1999, as one of the first artists in Visions for the Future, a programme of exhibitions for early-career Scottish artists. 

The latest exhibition brings together works from 1992 to the present in a celebration of Boyce’s work. It extends throughout the Fruitmarket, in the Exhibition Galleries and the Warehouse. 

Rising to the challenge of making a new exhibition in a familiar place, Boyce has created a different atmosphere for each space. 

First, an installation that uses the existing architecture of Fruitmarket to create a new structure in which to display a series of wall based works – from very early graphic text works to more recent painted panels. 

This leads on to a small room in which models and materials relating to Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s concrete Cubist ‘trees’ from 1925 are shown on a specially adapted concrete table. 

Boyce won the Turner Prize in 2011 and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.

Boyce’s interest in these trees, the lexicon of shapes, patterns and typography he has developed from them, have been much discussed in essays on the artist’s work, but never before laid out in an exhibition.

Next Boyce re-imagines the familiar space of Fruitmarket’s Upper Gallery, with a number of works brought together in an atmospheric new combination. 

From the immersive beauty of the very recent Future Blossom (For Yokeno Residence) to the subtly subversive interventions of the Ventillation Grills series, the works combine to make a magical, poetic space somewhere between inside and outside.

Finally, the Warehouse, where sculptures gather as though recently returned from or about to go out on exhibition.

Familiar works are shown in unfamiliar ways in this specially-designed installation as Boyce plays with ideas of storage, granting us access to a part of the exhibition or art making process that is not normally seen, and questioning how things slip into and out of mind and memory. 

We are proud to bring his work back in this major exhibition that includes a significant number of sculptures that have been shown internationally, but never before at home, giving our audiences the chance properly to explore the work of one of the UK’s most significant artists.

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