This month the Vancouver Art Gallery introduces a new exhibition by German-born contemporary artist Martin Honert co-curated by Gallery director Kathleen S. Bartels and artist Jeff Wall. Martin Honert will run until October 14th, 2013.

Known for creating meticulously rendered sculpture based on images and memories from his childhood in post-war Germany, Martin Honert recalls his generation’s experience by basing his works on images drawn from family photographs, illustrations from schoolbooks and storybooks, as well as his own childhood drawings. With each image he seeks to make it emotionally inert and reduce it to its “purest state” by isolating the image from its original context and often dramatically changing its scale. In so doing he attempts to “save an image before it dies within me.”

Martin Honert
Kinderkreuzzug/Children’s Crusade, 1985-
1987
acrylic on polyester and oil on canvas
Private Collection
© Martin Honert/SODRAC (2013)
Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art
Gallery

In Honert’s polyester-and-resin sculpture Feuer [Fire] (1992), the artist was inspired by a dictionary illustration that, as a child, became the very definition of fire in his mind. Honert then translated this symbol into plaster, with a later work evolving into a three-dimensional floor sculpture of painted and illuminated resin. His large-scale human figures, such as those in Riesen [Giants] (2007), manage to capture a sense of wonder achieved by recreating the world from a child’s point of view. Martin Honert investigates the potency of remembered images.