GERHARD MARX: terraterraterra | Cape Town Art Fair

INVESTEC CAPE TOWN ART FAIR | SOLO SECTION | 17 - 19 FEBRUARY 2023

terraterraterra participates in the re-imagining of the tropes and images through which landscape or the ‘environment’ is described, imaged and engaged. Current geopolitics question the central metaphors through which the world is rendered as exterior, as backdrop to human drama and as endless resource. New images have to be construed to hold new metaphors, to describe the more than human, to carry and imagine new relationships. The background is foregrounded.

terraterraterra aims to partake in this reimagining, with a particular interest in how spatial imaginaries act to affect the spaces which they describe, and how the act of drawing is complicit in this process.

These drawings are propositional sketches: ways to think through early forms of world making and terra-forming. The Persian ‘garden carpet’ tradition; the charbach (the fourfold division of the garden and world); the idea of the formal garden (and its relationship with the colonial project); and the mappa mundi are redrawn in a manner that subtly counters their intrinsic modernizing, structuring and flattening logic. The idea of the ‘feral’ – that which exceeds or escapes human control – is a central strategy and aesthetic within this project. With that enters the aesthetic of the ruin and the idea of rewilding: an unravelling that describes not only collapse but also a shift in register or modality.

When working with the idea of the botanical ‘Hortus Siccus’ (scientific collections of preserved and flattened plants, arranged systematically), I focused on the thriving diversity of plants found in interstitial spaces, known as ‘ecotones’. Ecotones are spaces in which different worlds or ecologies meet and overlap. Here I harvested dried plant material and the roots of weeds. I then made drawings by embedding the material into a thick, black acrylic bed. In this act of translation, the structuring, schematic lines of the garden carpet and the ancient Greek labyrinth give way to the tentacular and the uncertain. The flat schematic of the floor plan (literally platte grond, “flat ground”, in Dutch) opens up to the subterranean; collapsing surface into soil. When fragmenting and reassembling cartographies, I focused on geometries and compositions that playfully favour layering, repetition and dimensionality to counter the singularizing and individuating compulsion of scientific and cartographic description.

The work presented in terraterraterra, a solo booth at the Invested Cape Town Art Fair 2023, was largely produced while on the Ekard Residency outside Den Haag, The Netherlands. The residency provided me the space to contemplate and respond to the expansive Dutch histories and colonial legacies of terraforming, cartography and botany, the wilderness reserve around the residency, and the obsessive hedging traditions of the area.

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GERHARD MARX

(b 1976 Johannesburg, South Africa)

Gerhard Marx’s visual language is composed through a physical engagement with distinctive material traditions. His process entails careful acts of dissection and rearrangement, which allow Marx to engage the poetic potential and philosophical assumptions of his chosen material in the process of developing original drawing, sculptural and performative languages. A primary focus in his work engages physical depictions of space – ‘spatial imaginaries’ – with an interest in how these descriptions of space affect and shape that which it describes.  

Marx’s work has been shown at international art fairs (Art Basel, Frieze London, FIAC, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Basel Miami). It is held in numerous public and private art collections, and was included on the South African pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Recent theatrical work includes scenography and costumes for Lara Foot’s 2022 reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello for Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus.

Marx completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and received his MFA (cum laude) from Wits School of Art, Johannesburg, where he was a full time member of staff between 2003 and 2007, lecturing in both the Fine Art and Dramatic Arts Departments. Marx is a fellow of the Ekard Residency, the Sundance Film Institute, the Annenberg Fund and the Ampersand Foundation. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Installation images by Michael Hall