Helen Marten

British artist Helen Marten (born 1985) combines disparate materials and painted images in elaborate sculptural tableaux composed of assembled materials that resonate with associative meaning. Frequently employing visual and linguistic ambiguity in order to explore the potential of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, Marten’s output includes sculpture, videos, text and screen-printed paintings.
Conceived as an artist’s book-cum-catalog for an exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House focuses on key works produced by the artist in recent years, and offers detailed perspectives on Marten’s meticulous installations. With an essay by Brian Dillon that investigates Marten’s practice, as well as texts by Travis Jeppesen and Eileen Myles that take inspiration from the artist’s works, this volume presents a fittingly eclectic approach to one of today’s most restlessly innovative artists.

British artist Helen Marten (born 1985) humorously explores questions of ownership and dishonesty in the relationship of object to artifact and package to product. Marten’s installations, sculptures and videos play upon our reference systems for things and a coding of the visual that establishes our most elemental relationships to the material world. Marten thus weaves conversations between counterfeit and camouflage in which image is continually sabotaged by language, by a deliberateness of error that presents itself with all the concrete certainty of cultural legitimacy. This publication is the first to fully document Marten’s output. It accompanies a year-long exhibition touring at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Chisenhale Gallery in London and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. The book includes numerous installation and work views.