Martin Denker: CitizenOfThePlanet

LOS ANGELES – BENJAMIN TRIGANO GALLERY is pleased to announce the exhibition of 20 high-speed dynamic works by the extraordinary 32-year-old German artist Martin Denker in CitizenOfThePlanet. Combining elements from surrealism, Pop Art and science fiction in many layered, lusciously colored digital whirls of psychedelic images, Denker creates shimmering collages that sweep viewers into other worlds. He finds inspiration everywhere: in neurology and the processing of information in the human brain, as well as in digital technology, Buddhism, traffic, video games, psychotherapy, literature and, he adds, “the colors of some candy stores.” He believes anything can be an inspiration when the gates of perception are open.

Denker's background is as wide ranging as his interests and talents. He began his studies in English and Fine Art at Greifswald University, proceeding afterward to the University of Texas at San Antonio to work with two famed photographers Ron Binks and Swain Edens, where he became fascinated with staged scenes.

Denker then returned to Germany to attend the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, where photographer Thomas Ruff taught him post-production techniques, among many other crucial skills. In 2003, he made his Düsseldorf exhibition debut with a stunning digital landscape based on a 35 mm photograph of his own that he had taken of the Swamp Highway in Louisiana.

Following this succession of brilliant mentors, Denker began assisting superstar Andreas Gursky. On their trips together, he travelled into “unknown realms of perception and discovery,” to venues and locations that were extraordinary and enthralling, insane and megalomaniac. They went behind the scenes at the Olympic games in Athens, the Arirang gymnastic spectacle in North Korea, car racing in a Middle Eastern desert and pop concerts all over the world. “He made me a citizen of the planet,” Denker says.

It also set him in a new direction creating superbly composed, visual riddles from digital collage. He quotes painter Gerhard Richter, who said he would like to paint a picture that is better than he could imagine it himself. Trying for the same result, Denker uses Photoshop and other image processing applications, sometimes weaving together up to 50 photographic layers of countless sources for one final, extraordinarily complex image. He begins by searching for pictures from the news, war, film-stills, literature, childhood memories, graffiti, architecture and advertising and combines them with his own source images.

Working more like a painter than a photographer, Denker then starts combining the images into one striking whole, a process that can last up to three months. He superimposes, overlaps, distorts, intensifies and meshes them, so that they no longer resemble anything in the known world. In some of Denker's works, a viewer could imagine himself simultaneously in Shinjuku, Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. He notes that this is how the brain functions, with its hundred billion brain cells continually exchanging information. In his pictures every color and shape does the same thing.

“Brain research is at a stage,” Denker says, “where we know to a great extent how human vision and comprehension work: in every individual, comparably primitive visual codes are translated into real terms by being tallied against the extant images in the brain—in other words, against one's personal experiences. Thence intact, total communication is an impossibility, but what is possible are images of meaning to any human being. I believe that to understand this approach will lead—in good time—to a new Enlightenment.”

He compares his process to improvising in jazz; he starts jamming. The parts build up in a mixture of control and arbitrariness, like a rhythm or a theme, until eventually it becomes a symphony. He also includes actual physical matter, such as ice cream, dead insects and candy, which he puts directly onto the scanner so that it will be sucked into the digital realm. “Every single image I make,” he says, “is like a whole pop-album.”

When Denker mentions his heroes, names come up like Hieronymus Bosch, Jeff Koons, Aldous Huxley, Andreas Gursky, John Galliano, Salvador Dalí, René Lalique, Battista Farina (Pininfarina), Auguste Rodin and Charles Baudelaire. No one should be surprised. Like him, all these wild and brilliant artists searched for brave new worlds, believing in the infinite possibilities inherent in art.

“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.”

This is Martin Denker's first solo show at Benjamin Trigano Gallery and in the United States.

Location: BENJAMIN TRIGANO GALLERY, 612 N Almont Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90069
Show Title: MARTIN DENKER: CitizenOfThePlanet
Dates and Opening: December 13, 2008 – January 24, 2009; Opening: Saturday, December 13, 7 – 9p
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10a – 6p and by appointment

For more information, please contact Shannon Richardson at 310.550.6802 or shannon@benjamintrigano.com