Martin Boyce
Born in 1977 in Hamilton, Scotland.
Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.
Martin Boyce studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at the California Institute for the Arts. In 2011, he was awarded the Turner Prize. The artist represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and participated in the Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007.
Martin Boyce has reworked and reformulated iconic design objects, developing his own pictorial language based on a reading of the formal and conceptual histories of design, architecture and urban planning. While his oeuvre includes shapes drawn both from modernist and classic design sources, it also includes references to everyday urban objects, such as fences, trash bins, or telephone boxes. Transformed by Boyce’s vision of the history of design, these elements, remaining more or less reminiscent of utilitarian objects, create enchanted landscapes that appear as slightly laconic witnesses of past urban development programs but also imbue the formal vocabulary of contemporary urbanism with moments of unexpected tenderness and beauty.
His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; British Council, London; Gallery of Modern Art, GoMA, Glasgow; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; LACMA, Los Angeles; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among other institutions worldwide.
