Friday 5th October 2017 – Frieze
Circumspection by Gerhard Marx
The piece Circumscription by Gerhard Marx is made up of reconstructed map fragments is part of the Transparent Territories group of work.
In this dizzying series of maps for groundlessness, Gerhard Marx continues his investigations into the formal and fictive possibilities of perspective. Rupturing the flat surface of the map, he removes the illusion of solid ground and replaces it with a hovering, vertigo-inducing sense of uncertainty. The shape and notion of ‘the frame’ recurs in several mise-en-abyme sequences across the works. Stacked in recurring configurations, its rectangular form has been bent into a series of optical riddles or Escherian landscapes.
When Marx cuts into the map it is a violation – an act of violence against the institutions and processes of global modernity through which the world was filtered to him. That violence is present in the energy of dispersion, ruination and collapse that ripples through the fragmented surfaces of these works. But the story does not end there. Deconstruction is offset by the meditative, embodied practice of reconstitution. In constructing his drawings from the ‘found lines’ of decommissioned and discarded maps, Marx displaces the scientific authority of cartography with the subjective impulse of calligraphy.
The works in this series are random amalgamations of fragments of Africa and Europe, and in piecing them together he conflates space and historical time into ‘migrant maps’. Directly referencing the makeshift, hybridised vessels we’ve witnessed people resorting to in the current migration crises of Europe, several works have a raft-like look about them – temporary, floating, drifting between land(s) and territories. Hovering against a plane of deep opaque blackness, Marx’s reconstructed rafts/crafts transmit a sense of disorientation that is simultaneously disquieting and liberating. There is that vertiginous sci-fi sense of being cut loose from the mother ship to float indefinitely through all space and time, but also an ecstatic sense of possibility in being released from the grip of inherited systems of knowledge, measurement, power and control.
– Alexandra Dodd
She's a Fine Artist 