Martin Kersels

“If [Martin Kersels’] work has explored the sometimes fraught, always absurd relations between bodies and things, specifically bodies and machines, then part of what interests me is the automatism, the aspect of being human that’s outside our control. It’s the id, having a ball, compulsive, unstoppable, going on and on until it pulls its own plug out of the wall.”

– Leslie Dick, Contemporary Magazine, 2005

Redling Fine Art is pleased to announce Martin Kersels’ return to Los Angeles for his first solo show at the gallery: Seen and Heard. For this exhibition, Kersels will present three new sound- sculptures and two new series of collages. The sound-sculptures are all viewer operated. Cranking or winding the works creates a second presence, a sound to cohabitate with the sculpture in the space. The two sets of collages bring together found objects with found images. The Portraiture series combines paper-thin overcuts of found wood and discarded family photographs. The LP series uses more substantive wood paneling to focus our viewing of pop records, lost to aging technologies and shifting popularity. Kersels’ vocabulary of materials has only one rule: they must have been rejected and thrown-out. Using furniture, reclaimed architectural wood, photographs, record covers, and mechanical parts (all having been discarded at least once), Kersels creates works that embody the strangeness of the obsolete.

Martin Kersels was born in Los Angeles and attended UCLA, receiving his B.A. in 1984 and M.F.A. in 1995. His practice ranges from collaborative performances with the group SHRIMPS (1984–93) to large-scale sculptures such as Tumble Room (2001). Kersels' work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; MASS MoCA, West Adams, Massachusetts; Musee d’Art Contemporain, Marseilles, France; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; Museum Tingly, Basel, Switzerland; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. A survey of his work, Heavyweight Champion, was organized and exhibited by the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York in 2007 and traveled to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles in 2008.

Kersels currently lives and works in New Haven, CT, where he is the director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale University.