Minimal Maximal: Jersey-born artist returns for major exhibition

Internationally acclaimed painter Jason Martin is returning to Jersey next month for his first exhibition of large-scale museum works, made possible through sponsorship from Rathbones.

The sponsorship will also enable local art students to attend a talk by the artist about pursuing a successful career in art, offering an opportunity to learn from his experiences.

Born in Jersey in 1970, Jason Martin studied art under the late Robert Tilling MBE at Victoria College before graduating from Goldsmiths College in London in 1993. He went on to become associated with the Young British Artist (YBA) generation, gaining recognition through the landmark *Sensation* exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997.

Since the late 1990s, Jason Martin has achieved international recognition for his distinctive abstract paintings, with more than 30 major museum exhibitions, including a solo show at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. His work has been exhibited in London, New York, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and is held in major private, corporate and museum collections.

His auction record of £114,300 exceeds those of several other Jersey-born artists, including Philip John Ouless, Edmund Blampied and John St. Helier Lander.

Gallery Director Chris Clifford, who has known Jason Martin since childhood, said his dedication to art was evident from an early age. He explained: “Jason Martin occupies a distinctive position in contemporary abstract painting, at the intersection of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and the material  experimentation of postwar European art. The laying down of a single brush mark over the surface, which became his signature from the late 1990’s, where described by critics as ‘the most reductive statements in painting’,, and cemented his place in art history.

“His significance also lies in a deceptively simple proposition: a painting can simultaneously function as an image, a physical object and a record of the artist’s bodily movement and Martin belongs to a generation that inherited the achievements of twentieth-century abstraction but faced a fundamental question: What could abstract painting still contribute after Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman and the Minimalists had so comprehensively challenged its  conventions?

“The answer has been to make the physical substance of painting itself the subject rather than treating paint as a means of representing something else as he treats it as a sculptural material capable of generating light, rhythm, movement and spatial experience”.