COMMA 21: Martin Honert

Bloomberg SPACE presents Martin Honert's first solo exhibition in the UK for over ten years, including a new large scale installation commissioned specifically for COMMA.

Martin Honert is arguably one of the most acclaimed sculptors in Europe. Honert's meticulous sculptures are largely inspired by memories of his childhood. Employing illusion, manipulation of scale, and painstakingly rendered surfaces, Honert encapsulates his memories in images that are highly personal, but which still retain a symbolism that is universal.

Honert's interest lies in "saving an image before it dies within me", but there is no room in his work for an adult's misguided nostalgia about childhood. The aim of his material reconstruction of almost forgotten images is the imaginary and formal objectification of a subjective recollection. The basis of his works are family photographs, illustrations from old school books and novels, or drawings he himself made as a child that are taken from his archives. However, unlike most of the artists that invoke the readymade tradition, Honert actually fabricates all of his works from scratch by himself, which also accounts for his small output.

In response to the challenge of a COMMA commission, Honert has decided to create the second stage of a growing installation rather than exhibit a singular hermetic and completed piece as everyone would expect of him.

In the front gallery, he has re-created Schlafsaal – the dormitory of the boarding school where for five years he spent his school days. The installation is the physical re-creation of a photograph of the same name which Honert first exhibited in Dresden in 2009. Both the photograph and the corresponding installation evoke a post-war German dormitory at night. Honert has contextualised his newly commissioned installation in the front gallery at Bloomberg SPACE, by displaying a collection of six recent photographic works and sculptures in the rear gallery. Central to the collection of works in the rear gallery is Mitternachtsfest (Midnight Feast), a sequence of three photographs and the starting point of the extensive new work, Schlafsaal, commissioned for the front gallery. The series tells the story of a boarding school illicit midnight feast where boys would scoff beer, schnapps and sardines in oil during the darkness of the small hours.

Honert (born 1953) represented Germany in the 1995 Venice Biennale and had his first one-person exhibition in the United States at Matthew Marks Gallery, in 1999. His work was the subject of a retrospective organised by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 2007, and he is a highly regarded teacher at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. Honert lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dresden.

COMMA 21: Martin Honert