Martin Boyce (*1967 in Glasgow, lives and works in Glasgow and Berlin) is one of the most original of the Scottish artists who came to international prominence during the 1990s. He works at the interface of design, architecture, and the social environment.
When he disturbs the substance of the works of Arne Jacobsen, Mies van der Rohe, and Charles and Ray Eames, or when he builds his "fragile landscapes," he underlines the continuity between style, human habitat, and life. Distilling elements of familiar, anonymous urban environments, often appropriating iconic visual languages of classic modernist design, cinema, and architecture, Boyce weaves a complex web of associations in a process of describing and abstracting cultural and social spaces. The disquietening balance of opposites, of intimacy and distance, interior and exterior, beauty and tension within his installations, seems to amplify the unlocatable anxiety, paranoia, and dysfunction in contemporary cities at the same time as it encourages an almost nostalgic reverie.