Esther Schipper is pleased to present Walk with Me, an exhibition by Martin Boyce, hosted at the gallery space of Natalie Seroussi. This exhibition coincides with Unhome, the artist's second solo exhibition with Esther Schipper, simultaneously on view at 16 Place Vendôme.
The title Walk with Me references David Lynch's film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a landmark work known for its enigmatic atmosphere and refusal of a singular interpretation. Like the filmmaker, Martin Boyce embraces ambiguity, inviting viewers into a theatrical, disorienting, and emotionally charged dialogue with his work. This also echoes the approach of artists from the Surrealist movement, several of whose works will be presented alongside Boyce's own pieces, selected by the artist from the Natalie Seroussi collection.
The theme of fire, although omitted from the title, runs through the exhibition as a symbolic red thread. The 21-part photographic series Spook School (2016) documents the remnants of the Glasgow School of Art after a fire in May 2014. Designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the building is a landmark of Scottish Art Nouveau and for Boyce also a place of education and memory. Boyce captured the charred interiors during the renovation works, only two years before they would be ravaged and unsalvageably destroyed by a second devastating fire in 2018. Boyce's deliberately darkened, barely discernible images have become a haunting memory of a history now forever lost.
They engage in dialogue with La Planche à Ullman (1957) by Raymond Hains, a raw assemblage of torn posters, collected as found on the street. A visual and poetic correspondence emerges between the scraps of paper and the fractured school walls, revealing an aesthetic of fragments and traces.
A more direct reference to the immaterial power of fire is provided by Yves Klein's F 118 (1961) – a scorched cardboard mounted on panel. Created with a blowtorch, Klein's Fire Painting encapsulates a tension between control and chance, materializing a fleeting energy that Klein described as "ultra-living."
Boyce's sculptural work, Same Day (2015), takes the shape of a fireplace. Here, however, the object has been deprived of its flammability: Displayed centrally in the exhibition space rather than against a wall and set into a transport crate, Boyce highlights its non-functional status. Instead, the mantlepiece functions as a kind of proscenium arch, framing the stage-like space it contains. A dark opening to the left of the three-dimensional space, reminiscent of a stage door, may invite the viewer into an obscure parallel world.
Blue T with Orange Spot (1942), a small stabile by Alexander Calder, appears like an actor for this miniature stage – and an absurdist counterpart to Saffa, Omaggio a Mondrian e a de Chirico (1970), an open box of giant matches by Raymond Hains.
The theme of chance – a central engine of Surrealist thought – returns with Dial-a-Poem (1968–2012) by John Giorno. This telephone-based piece allows listeners to hear a randomly selected poem from among 282 recordings. Originally created in the New York Underground scene of the 1960s, it embodies a form of spontaneous narration where voice, randomness, and experimentation compose a poetic mosaic. Boyce chose to display Giorno's work on top of a stool made from off-cuts of wood which were subsequently charred, by Glasgow-based contemporary artist Andrew Miller.
An Exquisite Corpse created around 1928 by Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel, Max Morise, and André Breton fits perfectly within this lineage. Through this collective and blind drawing, the authors dismantle the notions of single authorship, narrative logic, and virtuosity, in favor of dreams, childhood, and the unconscious. This visual game of fragmentation and recomposition reflects Boyce's own approach: creating unity from heterogeneous elements.
The exhibition concludes with a photograph by Man Ray showing André Breton – co-founder and principal theorist of the Surrealists – lying down, made-up, in front of Giorgio de Chirico's The Enigma of the Day (1914). This image crystallizes a convergence of figures and narratives, opening onto a final scene where mystery, art, and memory intertwine.
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. In an extended act of homage, deconstruction and re-imagining, Boyce has, for example, assembled reconstructed versions of Charles and Ray Eames 1949 storage units or created mobiles with fragments of Arne Jacobsen’s chair from 1955. Since 2005, elements drawing on Jan and Joel Martel’s concrete trees constructed for the Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Pavilion of Transport at the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 have been an important part of the artist’s formal vocabulary. His recurring use of unlikely elements, among them sections of rusted chain-link fences or suspended metal chains of various thicknesses, freed from their function as demarcation or restraint, create oddly affecting sculptures.
Esther Schipper founded the gallery in 1989 in Cologne. In 1997 the gallery relocated to Berlin. Through more than three decades of continuous exhibition practice, the gallery has established itself as a major force not only in Germany but in an international context, with offices in Paris and Seoul and representatives in France, Spain, the United States, Latin America, South Korea, Taiwan and China. The gallery holds up to ten gallery exhibitions as well as multiple off-site projects each year and participates in leading art fairs across the globe.
