Germany
Martin Langer
‘Creating and inventing things, beings and worlds has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.’
Wood is the focus and the great passion of my artistic work.
The ‘Xylische Artefakte’ suggest familiar prehistoric or ethnological connections. It seems that people from other times and other cultures made them for practical use and used them extensively. The surfaces, some of which are heavily scarred, also suggest this. Weathering, gnaw marks and microbiological decomposition further point to great age. On closer inspection, however, these ‘artefacts’ are perplexing; they defy classification or identification. Admittedly, there are plenty of echoes of domestic utensils, farming or craft tools, and even ritual use.
In my ‘creatures’, I draw on the formal language of nature, extract its fundamental principles and use them to create new beings from a no-man’s-land between fauna and flora.
The human form appears in my earlier works in a highly simplified form, for example in the ‘Kings and Queens’ series.
