Author Description

In the spring of 2017 Martin Roth published a selection of his works presents the work of Austrian artist Martin Roth, whose practice moves across painting, sculpture, installation, video and interventions, working primarily with animals and plants. Martin Roth works between the boundaries of nature and art, combining the two worlds in unique ways and questioning the gap between humans and the natural world. In recent projects he has created a soundscape for a bonsai tree using amplified sounds of caged birds, frogs, fish and crickets; grown tufts of grass on Persian rugs; and populated a gallery with parakeets living in debris from the Syrian-Turkish border. Taken as a whole, his work examines how the introduction of an organic element can redefine a surface, an object or its relation to the surrounding space. His work can be large-scale and particular to a site. The fact that it requires the nurture of living organisms makes it strangely intimate and invites the viewer if not to engage directly, at least to consider his or her relationship to the work on a human scale. Martin Roth is an artist living in New York City. His work recently has been shown at Louis B. James Gallery, New York; Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna; mumok| museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, Vienna; and the Museum of Natural History in Graz, among other institutions.