KATY MARTIN is a visual artist whose work combines painting, photography and performance. She also makes film and video.
Her work has been exhibited at Fergus McCaffrey Gallery (New York and Tokyo); Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris); The Garage Art Center, The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, PPOW Gallery, The Vision Festival, The Clemente, The Narthex Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church, and The Tribeca Film Festival (New York); Alexander/Heath Contemporary (Virginia); The Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia); The Harvard Art Museums (Boston); GalerieForum Am Meer (Berlin); Green Dog Arts (Belfast); and The Beijing Audiovisual Center and The Art Museum of Shanghai University. In addition, her art has been featured in Bomb Magazine and the Danish journal, Katalog. Awards include a residency in the Chinese painting department at Shanghai University College of Fine Art, a film preservation by Anthology Film Archives, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Long-term collaborations include Berlin-NYC, a weekly photo exchange with a Berlin artist (ongoing since 2011); The Meeting Point Project, performance-based work with three Paris artists (2012-2018), and curatorial projects with a Shanghai film curator (2005-2010).
She is affiliated with Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris.
Influences
K Martin, After Bada Shanren #2, 2008
— LINK to Bada Shanren, Fish and Rocks, at the Met
Katy has an in-depth interest in Chinese painting. For her, it’s been a way to open up gestural abstraction.
She first traveled to China, in 2005, to show her films at the Shanghai Duolun Museum. Between 2005-2010, working in collaboration with a Shanghai film curator, she programmed American film/video in China (at MoCA Shanghai), was a regular contributor to a leading Chinese art magazine (Yishu Shijie), and curated Chinese media art in the USA (at Thomas Erben Gallery and Anthology Film Archives). In 2016, she was an artist-in-residence at Shanghai University.
In 2008, through Artists Exchange International, Katy was invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a new work based on an object in its collection. She chose Fish and Rocks, dated 1699, by the Chinese painter, Bada Shanren, and she’s been influenced by his art ever since.
Also, between 1978-1981, she made two films about Jasper Johns and the silkscreen print process. The films have shown at museums around the world and the interview on the soundtrack has been published several times. In 2024, she created a new film from the outtakes, a 30-minute memoir of her time at the print shop.
What has stayed with Katy as an influence is this. Jasper uses one art form to open up another, for example by using strategies that are better suited to printmaking to make his paintings. Katy’s art has developed as a hybrid form where painting takes place within the context of photography, and performance allows for the act of painting.
In 1974, she wrote an analysis of the puns in Marcel Duchamp’s film, Anémic-Cinéma, that was published in Studio International (London) and has been widely quoted in the literature on Duchamp.