Martos Gallery, New York
Founded in June 2007 in New York’s gallery district Chelsea, Martos Gallery is the third enterprise of Jose Martos who previously co-owned the Alona Kagan Gallery in Chelsea and the Martos Kagan Gallery in Soho. In early 2009 Grégoire Maisonneuve, who headed his own gallery in Paris, Galerie Maisonneuve, joined Martos Gallery as a partner and has since implemented his experience and vision. The core focus of the gallery is the representation of an array of internationally renowned artists, both established and emerging, working with a plethora of media.
Martos Gallery will present works by Los Angeles based artist Lincoln Tobier. Tobier, a native New Yorker, received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Known for his projects in sculpture, radio, and installation, Tobier has exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Europe, and Japan including the Venice Biennale, and LACMA.
« I have been a working artist for over twenty years. My work has taken a range of formal and physical manifestations and conceptual approaches including complex installations, sculpture, painting, photography, video projection, and public art projects. The sustained line of continuity in my work has been a critical exploration of the public sphere, the erosion of forms for open exchange and debate, and the structural and legal encroachment of democracy.
The work I am currently producing consists of a series of 3 x 4 foot paintings. More precisely, they are painted and/or silk-screened enamel on flat aluminum sheets, coated with a high gloss varnish. These works have no support structure and are screwed to the wall through the front, taking the form of a sign.
They can be read as an open film, an expanded cinema where each picture, in addition to possessing its own form to hold an image as a painting, also functions like a film frame, where scale shifts, repetition and montage by proximity and reflection, suggest an unfolding narrative.
The images themselves have evolved from a process developed while making a sculpture in which a single sheet, first of paper, then aluminum is printed, cut and folded into a free standing three-dimensional structure resembling a creature with many heads and legs and a flat horizontal body. Best described as a hydra-golem—an omnivorous, artificial meta-organism, this creature is an encapsulation of the over-lapping drives of the governmental / military / media / corporate / entertainment multiplex. »