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And the different levels in his works look sampled as well. With a mix of styles, of themes, of high and low, with a touch and a boldness like the Old Masters, Martin has had a strong impact on the image of young German painting, with only very few other artists of his generation having as much of an influence. Along with the "New Leipzig School" and stars such as Tim Eitel and Norbert Bisky, his name was always mentioned in connection with the hype of new figuration. Still, Martin occupied a kind of loner position. He was regarded as being a bit more ironic, snotty, and unscrupulous than his fellow artists - more committed to the spirit of Kippenberger or the cool Neo-Pop of Michel Majerus than to coming to terms with pan-German sensitivities. He is a conceptual painter, he emphasizes repeatedly, as though he wants to give his work a stringency that one might deny. Indeed, at first glance Martin's paintings look like anarchic, excessive pictorial narratives. His dictum that "We're in a supermarket and I'm filling up the cart" is continually cited. In the paintings he executed since the late 1990s, girls wearing baby dolls or miniskirts bustle about in surreal compositions consisting of logos, paint smears, sunsets, design fragments, and comic figures. Martin zaps from media images and set pieces of mass culture to citations from art history. He virtuously conjures up the coloring, motifs, and style of his painter heroes from the last century, ranging from Cranach via Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Goya to Picasso and Balthus.
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