Matthew Marks is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Martin Honert. This will be the artist’s third exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery and will include two new sculptures.

Giants is a sculpture of two men, each approximately eight feet tall. These figures, dressed in sweatshirts and carrying backpacks, are inspired by the artist’s memory of circuses from his childhood, when human oddities were still put on display. Remarkably lifelike, they are made of painted polyurethane, natural hair, and meticulously produced over-sized clothing.

River Landscape, the second sculpture on view, is a four-by-six-foot diorama showing a train traveling down the verdant banks of the Rhein river. The train emerges from a tunnel, disappears behind a mountain, and shortly thereafter reappears in the distance. Two trains are used in the sculpture, the one in the background slightly smaller, creating a forced perspective. The train makes its trip only once every few minutes, and, given the beauty of the landscape and the subtlety of the difference in scale, the artist invites the viewer to take his or her time and slow down to the pace the sculpture has set.

Over the past 25 years Martin Honert has produced an enigmatic, small and focused body of work, consisting of fewer than 50 objects. He graduated from the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, in 1988, where his fellow students included Thomas Struth, Katharina Fritsch, Thomas Schütte, and Andreas Gursky. Honert lives and works in Düsseldorf and Dresden. His work was the subject of a recent retrospective, organized by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden. He represented Germany in the 1995 Venice Biennale, and he has had one-person exhibitions at the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; the Kunstverein in both Hannover and Stuttgart; and the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Bourges.