Hostage circumstance (Unauthorised Twin-Set)

Winner of the 2016 Turner Prize, British artist Helen Marten is fast becoming established as one of the most important contemporary artists working today with works such as Hostage Circumstance (Unauthorised Twin-Set), 2013. Comprised of four parts, this iridescent set of drawings, watercolour and collage presents an enticing amalgamation of the figurative and the abstract. With their gentle lyricism, alluring pallet and crossbreeding of material, subject and form, these works on paper display a kind of visual poetry: a blue jacketed Admiral, who drunkenly clutches a terracotta carafe as he rocks on an old yellow chair, twice recurs like a half-recollected and hazy dream; abstract forms twirl mysteriously across the surface of the paper; an oversized shoe emits electric beams of yellow, mahogany and charcoal grey; a child-like figure rendered in black and white, appropriated from a well-known illustration of Charlie Brown from Peanuts, squats with a bag over his head between a kaleidoscopic female nude and a colossal laughing buddha. Drawing from a wealth of sources as diverse as literature, culture, folklore and fairy-tale, Marten’s unique and compelling visual language conjures an enigmatic world of open-ended narrative. ‘In her art, thinking is made concrete,’ writes Adrian Searle. ‘We are forever losing the threat and refinding it with Marten’ (A. Searle, ‘Helen Marten: an artist who thinks different from the rest of us’, The Guardian, December 2016).