HELEN MARTEN - Olive

British artist Helen Marten (*1985, Macclesfield, lives and works in London) pokes humorously at questions of ownership and dishonesty in materials, the relationship of object to artifact, and package to product. Interested in the grammatical approximations made in workmanship, Marten’s oeuvre weaves constant conversations between counterfeit and camouflage. Image is continually tripped up by language, by a deliberateness of error that postures with all the concrete certainty of cultural recognizability.

This publication is the first to fully document Marten’s extraordinary and extensive recent artistic output. It represents a year-long touring exhibition initiated by the Kunsthalle Zürich with the show “Almost the exact shape of Florida.” Together with “Plank Salad” at the Chisenhale Gallery in London and “No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed” at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, these three exhibitions present one of the most fertile, and one might say febrile, artistic productions of our time. The book includes numerous installation and work views as well as newly commissioned texts by Ed Atkins, Michael Archer, Kit Grover, Flint Jamison, and Richard Wentworth.

The book is published in the Kunsthalle Zürich series, with the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.