EDINBURGH.- In 2024 Fruitmarket turns 50 and celebrates with a programme that brings the very best of Scottish, British and international visual art and culture to Edinburgh, to inspire and energise audiences – for free – as they have been doing since 1974.

The first of the year’s major exhibitions is from Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce whose sculptures rework the textures and forms of the built environment.

Using the iconography of the everyday alongside the formal and conceptual histories of art, architecture and design, Boyce creates poetic landscapes which merge interior and exterior spaces. This exhibition brings together works from 1992 to the present in a celebration of Boyce’s work that offers the chance to explore the development of his artistic sensibility and sculptural language. This is the first major solo exhibition by the internationally renowned sculptor in Scotland in over 20 years.

“This year Fruitmarket turns 50 and what better way to celebrate than giving our audiences the chance properly to explore the work of one of the UK’s most significant artists? Martin Boyce last showed at Fruitmarket in 1999, as one of the first artists in Visions for the Future, a programme of exhibitions for early-career Scottish artists. We are proud to bring his work back in this major exhibition that includes a significant number of sculptures that have been shown internationally, but never before at home. Scotland is a cultural hotbed and it is great to have artists like Martin who run successful international careers from their homes in Scotland” said Fiona Bradley, Director, Fruitmarket.

This exhibition extends throughout Fruitmarket, in the Exhibition Galleries and the Warehouse. Rising to the challenge of making a new exhibition in a familiar place, Boyce has created a different atmosphere for each space.

First, an installation that uses the existing architecture of Fruitmarket to create a new structure in which to display a series of wall based works – from very early graphic text works to more recent painted panels. This leads on to a small room in which models and materials relating to Boyce’s history with Jan and Joël Martel’s concrete Cubist ‘trees’ from 1925 are shown on a specially adapted concrete table. Boyce’s interest in these trees, the lexicon of shapes, patterns and typography he has developed from them, have been much discussed in essays on the artist’s work, but never before laid out in an exhibition.

Next Boyce re-imagines the familiar space of Fruitmarket’s Upper Gallery, with a number of works brought together in an atmospheric new combination. From the immersive beauty of the very recent Future Blossom (For Yokeno Residence) to the subtly subversive interventions of the Ventillation Grills series, the works combine to make a magical, poetic space somewhere between inside and outside.

Finally, the Warehouse, where sculptures gather as though recently returned from or about to go out on exhibition. Familiar works are shown in unfamiliar ways in this specially-designed installation as Boyce plays with ideas of storage, granting us access to a part of the exhibition or art making process that is not normally seen, and questioning how things slip into and out of mind and memory.

Martin Boyce last showed at Fruitmarket in 1999, as one of the first artists in Visions for the Future, a programme of exhibitions for early-career Scottish artists. We are proud to bring his work back in this major exhibition that includes a significant number of sculptures that have been shown internationally, but never before at home, giving our audiences the chance properly to explore the work of one of the UK’s most significant artists.

New Monograph

Fruitmarket are making a new book to celebrate this exhibition, with installation imagery and new writing from writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell; and curators and writers Katrina Brown and Penelope Curtis.

Martin Boyce was born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire in 1967. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA in environmental art in 1990, then a MFA in 1997. He lives in Glasgow. Boyce won the Turner Prize in 2011 and since 2018 has been professor of sculpture at HFBK Hamburg.

Martin Boyce: Before Behind Between Above Below
March 2nd - June 9th, 2024