Martin Honert

Fascinated by the way in which images are captured and how they evolve within our memories, Martin Honert creates sculptures that are wonderfully obsessive depictions of ideas connected to collective experience. Using illusion, manipulations of scale and meticulously rendered surfaces, the artist attempts to recall-often obliquely-his childhood in post-war Germany.

Honert’s works draw on family photographs, illustrations from schoolbooks and his own childhood drawings. Unlike many artists who focus on memory, however, he avoids nostalgia, seeking instead to make the image emotionally inert by isolating it from its original context and often dramatically shifting its scale. With this deliberate distancing he attempts, in his words, “to save an image before it dies within me.” The first museum exhibition of this artist’s work in North America, Martin Honert will feature a series of sculptures that reveal the breadth of Honert’s investigations into the potency of remembered images.