Helen Marten, Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
On view during the run of exhibitions and shows surrounding the bustle of Frieze London, Sadie Coles HQ’s fall exhibition welcomes the work of artist Helen Marten this month, playing on notions of monumentality, scale and production through a range of motifs and concepts. Centered on a single conceit: the attempt the depict a horse, the show unfolds through a range of materials and modes that underscore the artist’s conceptually rigorous, yet playful approach to art-marking. In each instance, a sense of the inaccessible stands in the way of success, failing to materialize a horse through language or image.
Helen Marten, Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
On large wallpaper, a photographic image of a white horse stands occupying what looks to be the Davies Street gallery. The image is upside down, the horse hanging static and luminous. The horse is a real horse, documented inside the gallery space several months prior but the image-space it stands in is a mutant, a new construction of CGI treachery, skewed and altered to produce the perspectival artifice of an additional spatial dimension. The horse was there, at some point, but now is not, Marten’s attempt to make the horse appear can only exist as an effort here, and whatever reason the horse is no longer present is also obscured. Accordingly, the initial attempt is already presented in a lunge for the real. After that, later attempts seem couched in failure already. Yet the show pushes further, with twenty-six paintings of identical scale hung in an equally spaced circuit around the periphery of the gallery. A glib bronze temperature gauge in the form of a frog with downturned mouth and raised umbrella is repeated in sequence across each of the paintings. Each depicts a replicated view through a window onto a classic Romantic landscape.
Helen Marten, Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Helen Marten, Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
The scene is torturous in its repetitive similarity. Each painting has been made using snapshots captured from a real 3-dimensional model moving in multiplane fashion through the constructed landscape. These fictional renderings of signs – trees, fences, clouds, cliffs – become more than the simple possibility of existence of the great labour force of nature continually producing objects of human and social utility, but part of the trompe l’oeil effect of privileging mobility over stasis. These paintings also house a single “page†fragment of a fictional story written by the artist. Each paragraph begins with the next consecutive letter of the alphabet, an A-Z circuit whose narrative tells of the generative friendship of two strangers and their horse. The typography is punctured with falling leaves, 26 scattered over the beginning A, 0 at the concluding Z, meaning that a full seasonal cycle has flushed and then ended with the narrative closure of the story, the alphabet exhausted.
Helen Marten, Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
The result of these compiled images and fragments of text make one thing very clear: that a rupture between reality and art is always present, and that no matter the attempt to present “a horse,” seems always doomed to failure. True, even if a horse was installed directly into the gallery, would it appear the same? Or rather, would its own spectacle obscure its presence as “a horse?” Marten offers no answers here, but the attempt is truly intriguing.
The show is on view through October 29th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Helen Marten at Sadie Coles HQ [Exhibition Site]
