June 25 – September 25, 2011 at the Contemporary Gallery of MAMAC
Work No. 551
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Nice presents Work No. 551, 2006 by the British artist Martin Creed in the contemporary gallery of the museum. Its structure unfolds in a vast architectural space, breaking free from the very location of the exhibition.
Martin Creed is part of a generation that plays with spaces, both interior and exterior. The work is visible from the museum’s forecourt, enhancing this analogy.
Through his works, he provokes a relational art with dualities. Here, the artist offers us an environment half-filled (Half the Air in a Given Space) with brown-colored balloons.
He explains his artistic process as follows: “…I decided to use the balloons. And then I calculated the volume of a given space and half filled it with balloons, which was partly to balance the making of something and the not making of something[1].”
Thus, this artist explores the gap between emptiness and fullness, the visible and the invisible, creation and non-creation, by transforming and diverting architectural constraints into a play space where he manages to materialize the most intangible substance: air; as if the latter wanted to make something imperceptible perceptible.
In this way, he encourages the correlation between the visitor, the space, and the object through the antagonism of obstacle and passage.
It may not be unrelated to Yves Klein’s exhibition on April 8, 1958 at the Iris Clert Gallery: “The Specialization of Sensitivity in Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensitivity,” better known as “The Void,” or with Arman’s “The Full” exhibition in October 1960 in that same Parisian gallery where he took the opposite approach of his friend by filling the place with garbage objects.
Here, it’s about seeing the invisible; that is, emptiness in a tangible world like a journey to the center of the earth (Jules Verne), promoting the dialectic between space and time perhaps representing the relationships between Man and society.
Does questioning space through closed venues not reflect the compartmentalization of current society?
Born in 1968 in Wikefield, Great Britain, Martin Creed lives and works between London and Alicudi in Italy.
A graduate of the Slade School of Art in London, he won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2001 thanks to his work The Lights Going on and off.
This multidisciplinary artist articulates his work around various practices, and he is also known as a musician.
He brilliantly and humorously develops a minimalist oeuvre.
Since the 1980s, the artist has embedded his work within a defined artistic process, following an unyielding logic by cataloging and numbering them in chronological order of creation.
[1] “I decided to use the balloons. Then I calculated the volume of a given space and half filled it with balloons, which creates the balance between the creation of something and the non-creation”: Interview with Martin Creed, ART NOW, 2002, p.103
