MARTIN BOYCE

The main space is populated with sculptures, text, and panels softly coloured in muted hues of rose, lemon yellow and teal, and often rendered in perforated steel or thin glass, lending the room a sense of openness and lightness. The four corners of the main space are occupied by steel letters that spell out the words: Atomised Bones Stars and Dust. The phrase recalls the concise language of advertising but is underpinned by a sense of disorder. Boyce’s door handle piece, Days of End, 2026, underscores this tension and likewise carries a malevolent chill.

Medusozoa Blossom, 2026, a skeletal chandelier, holds a central place in the installation; the Medusozoa of the title referring to categories of jellyfish. (The glass lanterns were produced in collaboration with the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques, CIRVA, in Marseille.) As a blossom, the chandelier infuses the space with a spring-like atmosphere, as a jellyfish – compete with chain tentacles – it mixes delicacy and unease.

Natural and planetary shapes, present as motifs in Boyce’s earlier works, find new forms in the sculptures, Hang Up this Day, Put On the Night, 2026, and The Night Can Wait, 2026, and the wall panel Shipping Channels Drawn through the Mist, 2025. The celestial bodies of moons and suns are suspended within chains reminiscent of weeping willow branches. In the Bricks Space an earlier wall work, On the Other Side of the Glass – a Storm, 2014, casts its wan light onto an autumnal setting. A cast concrete table becomes an open field for a lone tree sculpture while a masked lamp, Dead Star (The Playwright), 2017-2024, looks on and takes notes. In the exhibition, perceptions change on noticing a new detail or the echoing of certain forms; one element pointing to the past – the Poliedri chandeliers of Carlo Scarpa, for example – another pulling us back to the present or else drawing us into a rumination on the future.

Martin Boyce (b. 1967, Hamilton) lives and works in Glasgow. He represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2011. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Before Behind Between Above Below’, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2024); ‘No Clouds or Streams No Information or Memory’, The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane (2021), ‘An Inn For Phantoms Of The Outside And In’, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2019); ‘Hanging Gardens’, A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, China (2018); ‘Remembered Skies’, commissioned by Tate Britain, London (2018); ‘Light Years’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2017); ‘Gasträume 2016’, Zurich (2016); ‘When Now is Night’, RISD Museum (2015); Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2015). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘HOUSE OF CARD’, MOCA, Toronto (2022); ‘I Know Where I’m Going • Who Can I Be Now’, The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow (2021); ‘True Faith’ at Manchester Art Gallery, U.K, as part of Manchester International festival (2017); ‘You Imagine What You Desire’, 19th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2014); ‘Common Ground’, 13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice (2012). Boyce’s recent projects include ‘A Thousand Future Blossoms’ commissioned by Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2019), and a major outdoor commission in the landscaped grounds of Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2019).

Courtesy The Modern Institute.