Virgil Marti (born 1962) is an American visual artist recognized for his installations blending fine art, design, and decor from a range of styles and periods. Marti’s immersive sculptural environments, often evoking nature and the landscape, combine references from high culture with decorative, flamboyant, or psychedelic imagery, materials, and objects of personal significance. The artist’s sculptures and installations have been featured in museums and galleries internationally since the 1990s. Marti was selected to participate in the 2004

Whitney Biennial The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...

. The artist has been awarded the Art Matters Fellowship, the

Pew Fellowship in the Arts The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a nonprofit grantmaking organization and knowledge-sharing hub for arts and culture in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US established in 2005. In 2008, Paula Marincola was named the first executive director. Th ...

, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Marti was the second invited artist in the Katherine Stein Sachs and Keith L. Sachs Curator Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Marti was a Master Printer and Project Coordinator at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. The artist has been a Senior Visiting Critic in the MFA Program at the

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Education

Marti received a B.F.A in painting from the School of Fine Arts at Washington University, and an M.F.A. in painting from

Tyler School of Art The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...

at Temple University. In 1990 Marti studied at the

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 t ...

Early work

Marti was interested in challenging distinctions between fine art and decoration while studying painting at Tyler School of Art. He began stretching patterned fabrics onto customized painting stretchers creating painting-sculpture hybrids, some of which visually approximated cushions or furniture. Marti also stretched the fabric directly onto the wall, achieving the effect of wallpaper and forming an environment for the objects he was making. Evolving from this early work, Marti experimented with designing and printing his own wallpaper while an apprentice at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1992. During this time, the artist produced his well-known work, ''Bully Wallpaper'' (1992) -- black-light sensitive “

psychedelic Psychedelics are a subclass of hallucinogenic drugs whose primary effect is to trigger non-ordinary states of consciousness (known as psychedelic experiences or "trips").Pollan, Michael (2018). ''How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of ...

-colored wallpaper” in French toile style, which in place of pastoral scenes, had yearbook portraits of all the boys who had tormented Marti in junior high school printed among its floral patterns. The writer Samantha Dyllan Mitchell notes, “this project is a clear predecessor to arti’slater endeavors, combining a serious devotion to style and design throughout history with a distinctly personal contemporary perspective.” Marti’s ''Bully Wallpaper'' (1992) was first shown in the boiler room of the Community Education Center, Philadelphia and was conceived with this space in mind. The work was later exhibited at the Paley Gallery,

Moore College of Art and Design Moore College of Art & Design is a Private college, private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its undergraduate programs are available only for female students, but its other educational programs, including graduate programs, are co-ed ...

, Philadelphia in 1992. In 1999 the

Holly Solomon Gallery Holly Solomon Gallery opened in New York City in 1975 at 392 West Broadway in Soho, Manhattan. Started by Holly Solomon - aspiring actress, style-icon, and collector - and her husband Horace Solomon, the gallery was initially known for launching ...

displayed Marti’s ''Bully Wallpaper'' at the

Armory Show The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was a show organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of ...

. In 2009 it was installed in the men’s room of Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum while Marti was a resident artist. In the early 1990s, Marti further incorporated decor into his artistic practice through collaborations with the artist Stuart Netsky. Netsky and Marti sewed fabric pillow shams embroidered with “one-line quotations culled from notorious figures of pop culture.” These ''Shams,'' presented as part of an installation, were a “tongue-in-cheek” commentary on queer culture and interior decoration. In 1995, Marti transformed a prison cell at the disused Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia for the exhibition ''Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/The Prison As Subject'', organized by Julie Courtney and Todd Gilens. Marti’s site-specific installation, ''For Oscar Wilde'', was an homage to the writer imprisoned for moral indecency in 19th-century England. Marti decorated the prison cell in a “William Morris-inspired design of Wilde’s day and fashioned an aesthetically pleasing cell...with beauty as one of its central themes.” Nature, both organic and artificial, dominated Marti’s installation -- “a meandering path” made from a border of silk lilies in full bloom lead to the doorway of the cell where the walls were covered with silkscreen printed floral wallpaper of the artist’s design.

Immersive installations

Marti fabricated a full-scale immersive domestic environment for his first major installation created for the group show ''You Talkin’ To Me'' (1996) at the ICA Philadelphia. A version of this installation, ''Hot Tub'' (1998) was shown New York City’s Thread Waxing Space in 1998. Marti’s installation transformed the gallery into a “brazenly tacky” domestic interior set in the 1970s complete with a hot tub, “smoked mirrors, electric candle flames, and deep-pile shag”. ''Artforum'' critic Frances Richard notes, “In Marti’s deftly kitschy installation,...a number of interesting issues coalesce—domestic space as social palimpsest, the Warholian appeal of mass-produced taste, and an appreciation for what curator Lia Gangitano refers to as “the purgatory” of suburbia. Most satisfying, however, is Marti’s understanding of the subtle ways in which a sculptural environment manipulates the physical perceptions of its audience.” For his 2001 solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, juxtaposed with the museum’s 19th-century architecture designed by

Frank Furness Frank Heyling Furness (November 12, 1839 - June 27, 1912) was an American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his diverse, muscular, often unordinarily scaled b ...

, Marti installed fluorescent wallpaper glowing under black-light, depicting a ‘psychedelic landscape’ of palm trees and waterfalls, which artist and critic Eileen Neff observed -- 'caused a visceral jolt'. Neff writes, “the scene announced the kind of botanical anomalies Marti finds in the recollected landscapes of

Frederic Church Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, ...

as well as the geographical peculiarities in some panoramas of nineteenth-century ‘scenics.’ But Marti’s take on transporting wallpaper also evoked the

vernacular of the ’60s and ’70s and awakened the viewer's sense of nostalgia.” By “pushing the decorative to visceral extremes, usually leading back to nature in some distorted form,” Marti’s installations offer a context where elements of decor and design recalled from his own upbringing or personal history, that are considered lowbrow, ugly, or flamboyant, can belong.

Grow Room

Marti’s 2002 immersive installation ''Grow Room'' conjuring both Whistler's Peacock Room as well as ‘ 2001: A Space Odyssey’, was the inaugural exhibition at New York’s Participant Inc. Marti lined the walls with reflective Mylar screen printed with images of artificial flowers—poppies, roses, hydrangeas, among images of macrame spiderwebs based on scientific photographs “of webs spun by spiders who had been fed drugs.” From the gallery’s ceiling, the artist suspended chandeliers made from colored resin casts of deer antlers with blossoms at the tips. Reviewing the exhibition for ''The New York Times'', critic Holland Cotter notes, “the outcome is a merging of pop culture, art history, weird science and adolescent fantasy.” Marti presented a second version of ''Grow Room'' at the 2004

. Marti also used reflective mylar screen printed with images of flowers and macrame spiderwebs illuminated by colorful resin antler chandeliers in his installation ''The Flowers of Romance'' (2003) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Marti presented a version of this installation in a group exhibition at

The Andy Warhol Museum The Andy Warhol Museum is located on the North Shore of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist. The museum holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archive ...

, Pittsburg in 2004.

Installations incorporating artworks from museum collections

Set Pieces

In 2010, Marti was asked to curate an exhibition for the ICA Philadelphia. Utilizing his process for creating his own artworks, Marti mined the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection and restaged paintings, decorative art, and sculpture “knowingly confusing high and low, period and contemporary, formal and informal design.” Marti’s arrangements were informed by some of his favorite films including ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’, ‘L’Avventura’, and 'Nashville'.

Matrix 167 Ode to a Hippie

Marti’s 2013 solo exhibition at the

Wadsworth Atheneum The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...

, Hartford, CT, ''MATRIX 167 Ode to a Hippie'', “explored the lingering romantic notions” of the English Romantic poet

John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculo ...

and American artist

Paul Thek Paul Thek (November 2, 1933 – August 10, 1988) was an American painter, sculptor and installation artist. Thek was active in both the United States and Europe, exhibiting several installations and sculptural works over the course of his life. Po ...

- both sources of creative inspiration for Marti. Marti’s site-specific installation included Keats’ death mask which is held in the collection of the Atheneum as well as the poet’s life mask borrowed for the exhibition from a private collection. Marti’s pairing of Keats’ life and death mask was inspired by Thek’s installation ''The Tomb'' (1967), later known as ''Death of a Hippie''. Marti’s Wadsworth installation featured his wall-mounted “looking glasses” - ornate mirror-shaped forms referencing late 18th century Chippendale-style mirrors. Marti’s ‘mirror’ façades have a trompe l’oeil wood grain surface and silver finish that captures only subtle shifts in light, thwarting the expectation of a true reflection. Marti tints the mirrors in horizontal bands, “suggestive of Color Field paintings”, using colors that reference a range of inspirations including the dramatic skies in the paintings of Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, and James Hamilton, as well as “1960s counter-culture aesthetics.” The Wadsworth installation “explored life and death" through an inventive evocation of an English garden with shrines, a faux natural setting embellished with “hippie-craft” elements, alongside Marti's sculptural faux wood furniture made from cement. Marti re-presented the Keats death mask in ''Forest Park'', the artist’s 2014 solo exhibition at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. A catalogue accompanied the Locks Gallery exhibition with an essay by art critic Hilarie Sheets.

Other exhibitions

In 2007, Marti exhibited sculptures in the form of bright, ornate chandeliers and dramatic gold 'bone curtains' in a joint exhibition with artist

Pae White Pae White (born 1963) is an American multimedia visual artist who is known for her unique portrayal of nature and rather mundane objects through her creations of suspended mobiles. She currently lives and works between Sonoma CountySonoma County, ...

at the

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...

. In 2017, Marti’s work was featured in the

Barnes Foundation The Barnes Foundation is an art collection and educational institution promoting the appreciation of art and horticulture. Originally in Merion, the art collection moved in 2012 to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pen ...

’s exhibition, ''Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie''. The artist created two identical circular 'poufs' --banquettes-in-the-round upholstered in a mixture of textured fabrics. Marti’s poufs often function as symbolic portraits in the artist’s installations. Marti titled the Barnes’ work ''Doppelganger'' (2017), installing one of the plush poufs in the Barnes Collection Gallery for the duration of the exhibition, while its 'twin' traveled to four indoor and outdoor locations across the city of Philadelphia. Marti also included fabric poufs, ‘looking glasses’, and faux swag wallpaper in the 2019 group show ''Less is A Bore'' curated by Jenelle Porter at the ICA Boston. In 2019, Marti was the subject of a solo exhibition at the

John Michael Kohler Arts Center The John Michael Kohler Arts Center is an independent, not-for-profit contemporary art museum and performing arts complex located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, United States. An element of landscape connected the works in the exhibition, which had at its center, a glass terrarium that Marti created in the 1970s, surrounded by bric-a-brac objects collected by the artist, a ‘horizon colored’ candle, stretched soda bottles, fabric poufs, a chandelier, and tire with a rainbow trim.

Public artworks

In 2000, Marti’s large-scale public artwork ''Couch'' (2000), a 30-foot long upholstered sofa with tasseled throw pillows was installed in the Ardmore Station, Ardmore, PA. In 2013 Marti’s large-scale sculptural installation ''Five Standards (Dazzle)'' was permanently installed at Philadelphia’s Navy Yards. Marti’s sculpture ''Anomalous Cloud'' made of polished stainless steel and mirrored acrylic, suggesting an “abstracted thought bubble”, floats like a “geometric cloud” from the ceiling of the 36th floor of the

Comcast Technology Center The Comcast Technology Center is a supertall skyscraper in Center City, Philadelphia. The 60-floor building, with a height of , is the tallest building in Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the fourteenth-tallest building in the ...

building in Philadelphia. A chandelier by Marti is on long-term loan to the ICA Philadelphia and is currently installed in the entrance to the museum.

Exhibitions

Virgil Marti's work has been exhibited at institutions including White Columns, New York; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Participant Inc., New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Visual Arts Center, Richmond; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville; Montreal Biennial, Montreal; The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; MoMa P.S. 1, New York. Marti has had exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.

Personal life

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1962, Marti currently lives in Philadelphia.

References

External links

* https://www.academia.edu/28606082/Auther_Wallpaper_the_Decorative_and_Contemporary_Installation_Art * https://www.thewadsworth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/WA-MATRIX-167-Brochure-4.1-pages-FINAL.pdf * https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/1881390160 * https://hirshhorn.si.edu/dynamic/archives/Directions_Virgil_Marti_Pae_White.pdf *https://update.comcast.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/dlm_uploads/2019/10/ComcastTechnologyCenter.pdf {{DEFAULTSORT:Marti, Virgil 1962 births Living people American artists American installation artists Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumni