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 Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre (Paris); Fergus McCaffrey Gallery (New York and Tokyo); 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); The Beijing Audiovisual Center, and The Art Museum of Shanghai University (China). In addition, her art has been featured in Bomb Magazine and the Danish journal, Katalog. Awards include a film preservation by Anthology Film Archives and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Collaborations include Berlin-NYC, a weekly photo exchange with a Berlin artist (ongoing since 2011); The Meeting Point, performance-based work with three Paris artists (2012-2018) and curatorial projects with a Shanghai film-maker (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
When she arrived in New York in her early twenties, Katy haunted the museums and fell in love with the big, expansive paintings of the Abstract Expressionists. At the same time, she was obsessed with Marcel Duchamp, whose spare conceptual work was at odds with the sensual excess of painting. She was fluent in French and spent two years puzzling out the nine puns in Duchamp’s film, Anémic-Cinéma. Her analysis was published in Studio International (London) in 1974, and has been widely quoted in the literature on Duchamp.
She’d trained in painting, but around that time, she also began making experimental films. Often, they were portraits of the people around her. Between 1978-1981, she made two films about the artist, Jasper Johns, and the Japanese master printers at Simca Print Artists. These films have shown at museums around the world and the interview on the soundtrack has been published several times. For Katy, this was a formative experience and just recently, she created a new film from the outtakes. What has stayed with her 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.
Katy also has an in-depth interest in Chinese painting. She first traveled to China, in 2005, to show her films at the Shanghai Duolun Museum. Between 2006-2010, 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 (Thomas Erben Gallery and Anthology Film Archives). In 2016, she was an artist-in-residence in the Chinese painting department 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 their collection. She chose Fish and Rocks by the 17th-century Chinese painter, Bada Shanren, and she’s been influenced by his art ever since.