Mary Martin
(1907 - 1969) |
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Sculptures and abstract paintings Art Work
| Name: |
Mary Martin |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Folkestone, England |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1907 |
| Death: |
1969 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Sculptures and abstract paintings |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Sculptor
Painter
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Biography
It was not until she was in her forties that Mary Martin worked as a full-time artist. She had studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, painting still life and landscape. An early copy of a painting by Watteau in oil survives (c.1929, private collection), incongruous next to the geometric abstraction for which she became known.
By 1950 Martin had moved completely away from figuration, first painting, then making reliefs in metal, Perspex, plaster and wood. Along with her husband, the sculptor Kenneth Martin, she became a leading member of the constructivist revival in Britain, creating work concerned with nature but which sought to explore natural laws of space and light rather than make figurative representations. A limited repertoire of forms, often a dissected cube, were arranged in permutations suggested by mathematical ideas, and sometimes colored. Martin won the John Moore's art prize (1969, joint winner with Richard Hamilton), had a number of solo exhibitions, (including the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1960 and a tour from the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford, in 1970, both with her husband), and showed with the Artists International Association and the London Group. A retrospective was held at the Tate in 1984.
Some of Martin's most important work was made with architects, part of her project to give art a social function. With Kenneth Martin and the architect John Weeks she constructed a pavilion for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. Her reliefs spread over the panels dividing up the space, an integral part of the environment rather than a surface decoration. Her commissioned works included Tidal Movements of 1960, made for the P & O ship the SS Oriana. And she also made multiples, participating in the group project 'Unlimited Multiples' in 1969 {along with Lilian Ujn, among other artists), an attempt to mass-produce mail order art from a workshop in Bath, making it accessible to all. Martin was quoted in the catalogue arguing that works of art were 'physical, material presences meant to be handled, gazed upon and lived with. To possess them, both privately and publicly, is a primitive human urge: food for the mind and the spirit.'
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Samples of Work
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