Martin Fenne
Martin Fenne (1964) has experimented with materials such as wood, cardboard, plexiglass, wax, and textiles. Since 2003, he has been working with piping: thin strips of satin fabric that follow the forms of bodies and objects in a wavy fashion. In doing so, he plays with the light caught by the shimmering strips of satin. In the series *Sleepers*, the figures depict people sleeping on a mattress or just waking up: an ode to the poem by the American poet Walt Whitman. The figures have a strong painterly character; each figure is constructed entirely from a color-centric perspective, much like Giotto, Van Eyck, or Piero della Francesca used color to give human figures volume and dynamism. They are also a kind of flat sculpture that hangs freely on the wall, appropriating that space as it were. In the works that follow, the subject matter becomes more neutral: cardboard boxes constructed from satin piping using the same labour-intensive method.
Following this, Martin Fenne shifts his focus to nature and depicts mushrooms on tree trunks, sometimes in fluorescent colors, giving the image a hallucinatory quality. Over the past two years, he has developed new work regarding the four natural elements. The impetus for this was the floods in South Limburg in 2021, through which Fenne implicitly also touches upon the climate crisis. Water is the first work in the series, featuring aquatic plants swaying in the current of a brook; fire is a dramatic forest fire with intense golden-red flames gnawing at black trunks. Earth is depicted as a geological deposit in ochres and browns in which a large stone has become embedded; air is a dynamic cloudy sky through which a ray of sunlight breaks. With the four elements, Martin Fenne also refers to the different spheres in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
| 1964 | The Netherlands |
education |
|
| 1987-1989 | Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
| lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands | |
solo exhibitions |
|
| 2013 | RAW Art Fair, Galerie Maurits van de Laar, Rotterdam, NL |
| 2012 | Sleepers, LUMC, Leiden, NL |
| 1996 | Tangled Tale, Paraplufariek, Nijmegen, NL |
group exhibitions |
|
| 2013 | Channelling Culture, Museum Helmond, NL On the Edge, De Garage, Rotterdam, NL Rijswijk Textile Biennial, Museum Rijswijk, NL Galerie Maurits van de Laar, The Hague, NL Galerie Lutz, Delft, NL |
| 2012 | Orpheus and Euridice, Art laboratory, Deventer, NL |
| 2007 | Quantumfish III, RC de Ruimte, IJmuiden, NL |
| 2006 | Nieuwe uitleenschatten, installation in collaboration with Mieke Marx, Der Aa-church, Groningen, NL Galerie 32-34, in collaboration with Mieke Marx, Amsterdam, NL |
| 2002 | Amsterdam Visit, in collaboration with Mieke Marx, Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam, NL |
| 2001 | The Sweatshop, W139, Amsterdam, NL |
| 2000 | Nothing. It will show itself, installation in collaboration with Mieke Marx, W139, Amsterdam, NL |
collections |
|
| AKZO Nobel Art Foundation, The Netherlands Aegon art collection, The Netherlands Kolibri Collection, The Netherlands BK Groningen, The Netherlands |
|
