2020 University of applied Arts Vienna, Class of Judith Eisler

Martens’ practise explores how subjectivity is shaped through images, memory, and material. Working across painting and object, her figures appear in states of searching and misrecognition, formed through acts of looking, reflection and projection. In a culture defined by endless archiving, saved posts, screenshots, photographed moments, images accumulate as fragmented and weightless data. Martens returns to her own camera roll as a source for painting, using the medium as a slow translation of selected digital fragments into physical form. Through oil emphasizes materiality as a carrier of memory and time. The painted image shifts from data to object, recording the duration of looking and allowing the viewer to follow its painterly movement into form. Her figures often hover between human and non-human, the familiar and the estranged, opening a space where identity remains fluid and in constant flux.

Esther Martens is a Canadian and Austrian artist who lives and works in Vienna.