Fabian Marti

Born 1979 in Fribourg, Switzerland, Fabian Marti lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland, and Los Angeles, USA. Fabian Marti’s photographs and sculptures reflect his fascination with primitive cultures and the worlds of symbols they create, and with subcultures, circles and music scenes. His large, dark images are infused with enigmatic symbolism, something pointed up by the use of symbolically charged objects, their arrangement and striking repetition.

As a response to the values of entrepreneurship set by Credit Suisse, Fabian Marti developed two images, both playing on the Family topic. They each show a bright palm of the hand on a black ground, with the lines, furrows and folds of the hand black, evoking a strangely occult mood. In order to achieve this effect, Marti dyed his palms with a stamp pad, impressed them on white paper, scanned in the impression, and then inverted the image. Family is expressed in a multitude of ways, all of them recurrent topics in the young work of Fabian Marti.

For one there is the idea of genealogy and the question of heritage and timeline. Another approach to the work is the depiction of the father figure as in having a biological father, but also inspirational father figures. The method that Marti has used to produce this work can be described as photogrammatic scanning and has been perfected by the artist. The scanner is used instead of a camera, with the objects to be depicted placed directly on the scanner glass.

By leaving the scanner’s lid open, the incipient light both creates a dark depth and lends the objects a surprisingly three-dimensional feel. Marti’s nascent symbolism succeeds in creating a strange and unique life world that is to be located somewhere between horror movies and the fantastic realm of romance novels. The artist has held solo shows at Peter Kilchmann Gallery in Zurich, Alexandre Pollazzon in London, the Volkart Stiftung in Winterthur and the Salon Vert in Prague.

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