DANI MARTI ‘Radical Textiles’ at the Art Gallery of South Australia

November 13, 2024

Dani Marti will be featured in the major group show ‘Radical Textiles’ at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) with his large-scale installation ‘Troughman’. The exhibition celebrates the cutting-edge innovations and shared knowledge that have been folded into fabric over the past 150 years. Showcasing the work of more than 100 artists, designers and activists, this major exhibition draws on AGSA’s international, Australian and First Nations collections of textiles and fashion, augmented by sculpture, painting, photography and the moving image, alongside several new commissions.

On his work ‘Troughman’, the artist says: “The floor sculptures I make use as much a formal aesthetic, with the cube as its main expression, as an unstructured esthetic, of a more organic character. In many occasions, the sculpture constitutes a conceptual extension of the painting. In the case of Troughman (the yellow peril), which was inspired by a famous gay character of the Australian night circles, the cube with its five exposed surfaces manifests a strong physical presence. This conveys the sensation that the woven structure covers a reality that is barely reachable for the viewer. When I work with sculpture I like to establish a direct dialog with the main representative works of the seventies minimalism – Judd, Andre, Morris- and reinterpret them in terms of form, concept and materials. My artistic work constitutes a sort of “emotional” minimalist.”

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Image caption: Dani Marti, ‘Troughman (the yellow peril)’, 2006, polypropylene, nylon and wood frame on castor wheels, 180 x 180 x 180 cm