dani marti artwork

dani marti

artist in residence 2018

Dani Marti is one of Australia's most exciting artists recently rising to international acclaim, challenging audiences, curators, and critics with his unorthodox combination of hand-woven 'canvases' and video documentary.

Connecting the two mediums is a kind of portraiture which strives to get beneath the 'surface' of family, friends, lovers, and strangers. These psychological, sociological, emotional, and often graphic physical depictions push ethical boundaries, raising difficult questions about relationships, gay encounters, intimacy and trust, while questioning the role of the artist, the power of the video camera and the cultural politics of the viewer. With his woven works, Marti's questioning turns to wider notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism, and geometric abstraction.
[Arc One Gallery]

Dani Marti was born 1963 Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works Sydney, Australia and Glasgow, Scotland. Marti works across video, installation and public art. Each work constitutes an intimate portrait of an encounter, challenging conventions around portraiture. His unorthodox woven and filmic works turns to wider notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism, and geometric abstraction.

Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, Dani Marti's work is hinged to a representational paradox. For on the one hand it presupposes belief in the act of portrayal, and on the other hand it tacitly admits portraiture's inevitable failure to accurately capture.

His relation to his subject is consistently fixed: an obsessive, laborious, and often desire-driven attempt to represent something of his subject that is beyond appearances. Something of a deep-rooted lust between him and his subject, something of an essence, something, in other words, beyond surface. But it is surface-quite literally-that we as viewers are left with in Marti's work, nothing objectively closer to 'the real' other than what one chooses to see and read into it. Marti's work is thus an explicit reminder that viewer subjectivity is the only place where the portrait can truly be generated. His gestures toward it are merely our starting points.

Since 1998, Marti has held over 30 solo exhibitions, most recently he exhibited I am at Arc One Gallery in Melbourne 2017 , and Black Sun at Perth International Art Festival (2016), La Vida es Esto, Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain (2015), Obey Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Chile (2015), Adelaide Biennial (2014); VIDEONALE 14 Kuntsmuseum, Bonn (2013); Economy, CCA Glasgow(2013); TOUCH: The portraiture of Dani Marti a major solo retrospective at Newcastle Region Art Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include: Let the Healing Begin, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2011); Social Documents: The Ethics of Encounter, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2010); Vocal Thoughts, Contemporary Art Center of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, (2010); Cinema X: I like to Watch, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2010). He is held in the collections of the GoMA Brisbane, MCA, Sydney, GoMA Glasgow , The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Art Bank, Sydney, the Chartwell Collection, Auckland, City Art Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, University of Wollongong, New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow.

The first major monograph of his work has been published by Hatje Cantz in 2012.