Bruce Silverstein is pleased to announce AbsoluteZero, the first New York solo show of the explosive works by 33-year-old German artist Martin Denker. Featuring nine large-scale pieces, interwoven, and abstracted through the layering and morphing of manifold visual sources, AbsoluteZero expands the definition of the capabilities and expectations of photography.
Denker’s works uniquely teeter between Surrealism, Pop, psychedelia, and science fiction; his mind-blasting photo-based montages draw the beholder into a system seemingly of fantasy but in fact steeped in reality. Rather a creator than an accumulator, Denker uses image-processing/altering applications to compose and orchestrate scores of photographic layers comprising of countless, disparate sources into one final, extraordinarily symphonic image - a process that lasts several months.
Denker seeks constant inspiration and stimuli everywhere: in neurology, the Internet, Buddhism, video games, psychotherapy, literature, and the history of the arts. Searching for pictures from the news, war, film-stills, magazines, childhood memories, graffiti, architecture, pornography, and advertising, and combining them with his own source images Denker superimposes, overlaps, distorts, intensifies and meshes them into one coherent image, so that they no longer resemble anything in the known world.
“I want to show a planet infested with a species in rage,” he says, “in acceleration and constant motion—in becoming an abstract phenomenon. But I also want to show how much beauty we can find in this current, sometimes scary, development, when we see it as an adventure or a challenge. My images are some deducts of the world I'm observing—a fast, overpowering world.”
While at first glance Denker’s images share aesthetic connections to works produced by Robert Rauschenberg, Kenny Scharf, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakimi, upon closer inspection Denker’s pictures are in fact both personal and unique; they are physical artistic embodiments of a complex human mind that is constantly in motion, absorbing, processing, and outputting all stimulation around it.
Martin Denker attended the Art Academy of Düsseldorf as a master student of Thomas Ruff. He assisted Andreas Gursky from 2002 to 2007.