Studio Visits - Simon Martin, Martin Westwood

In an increasingly congested art world, we invite you to escape the frantic contemporary art social scene and join us for an intimate programme of engagement with artists and the ideas behind their work, hosted by them in their studios.

This programme of studio visits extends over five mornings during the spring providing a unique opportunity to have a moment of meaningful reflection and insight into the work of artists handpicked by the Contemporary Art Society to promote a dialogue between artists and contemporary art enthusiasts.

Studio visits: Martin Westwood, Simon Martin

£250 for 5 studio visits
£50 per visit

For more information please email: lois@contemporaryartsociety.org

Simon Martin was born in 1965 in Cheshire, England and
is represented by Carl Freedman Gallery, London. Solo exhibitions
include Counter Gallery, London (2006), The Power Plant, Toronto (2006) and White Columns Gallery, New York (2005). In 2008 he won the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award.

Martin's recent film works consider how a museum or gallery is navigated by its visitors, questioning ideas of value, how objects are perceived by the viewer, and the ever-increasing accumulation of 'stuff’. Martin recently showed Untitled, 2008 at the Chisenhale, an animated film of his earlier photo-realist painting of a poison-dart frog, poised on a glistening leaf.

Martin Westwood was born in 1969 in Sheffield, England. Westwood won the Delfina Studio Trust Award in 1994. Recent solo exhibitions include The Approach, London (2008), Art 37 Basel (2006) and Art Now Project Space, Tate Britain (2005).

Westwood works with mass-produced materials collected from the corporate environment – paperclips, carpet tiles, vinyl stickers and newspapers – which he transforms through idiosyncratic processes of destruction and reconstruction to form highly crafted components for his larger installations. He thus explores the fossil evidence of the bureaucratisation of human life, engaging with the emptiness of the corporate re-imagining of our species.