Gerhard MARX (b. 1976)
Horizontal Figure I
2005
cut and reconstituted map fragments
38 x 141 cm
Bird with Stars
2007
photographic contact print
edition of 5
49.5 x 60 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Johannesburg, Gerhard Marx completed his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and received his MFA (cum laude) from Wits School of Art, Johannesburg, where he was a full-time member of staff between 2003 and 2007, lecturing in both the Fine Art and Dramatic Arts Departments.
Marx’s poetic and philosophical visual language is composed through a physical engagement with distinctive material traditions. His process entails careful acts of dissection and rearrangement, which allow him to engage the poetic potential and philosophical assumptions of his chosen material in the process of developing original drawing, sculptural and performative languages.
A primary focus in his work engages physical depictions of space – ‘spatial imaginaries’ – with an interest in how these descriptions of space affect and shape that which it describes.
Marx uses acts of fragmentation and reassembly to construct alternate and deliberately complicated spatial propositions that aspire to hold multiple positionalities, doubled presences, folded histories, spaces that exist across, in between, and amongst.
Locus (Richmond), a public sculpture for the small town of Richmond in the Northern Cape of South Africa, was completed in 2022. Previous public sculptures include Vertical Aerial: JHB (Hollard, Johannesburg); The World On Its Hind Legs, a collaboration with William Kentridge (Beverley Hills, Los Angeles); The Fire Walker, in collaboration with William Kentridge (Queen Elizabeth Bridge, Johannesburg); and Paper Pigeons, in collaboration with Maja Marx (Pigeon Square, Johannesburg).
Marx’s work has been shown at international art fairs (Art Basel, Frieze London, FIAC, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Basel Miami). It is held in numerous public and private art collections, and was included on the South African pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
His performance project Vehicle, was staged at The Centre For The Less Good Idea (Johannesburg, 2018) with musicians Shane Cooper and Kyle Shepherd and at the 2019 ‘Holland Festival’ (Amsterdam) with violinist Diamanda Dramm and bassist Shane Cooper.
His seventh solo exhibition Ecstatic Archive, was held at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 2019, accompanied by the publication of a monograph of the same title. It was followed by Spatial Imaginaries, Propositional Cartographies, which opened at the Goodman Gallery, London 2021.
He has extensive experience in theatre as scenographer, director and filmmaker, including the operatic REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (directed by Marx, film by Gerhard Marx and Maja Marx, composed by Philip Miller), performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank, London (2010), the Market Theatre, Johannesburg (2008) and the 62’Centre, William’s College, Massachusetts (2007). He was also responsible for the scenography and costumes for Lara Foot’s 2022 reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello for Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus.
Marx is a fellow of the Eckhart Residency, the Sundance Film Institute, the Annenberg Fund and the Ampersand Foundation. He lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He is represented by Everard Read Gallery.