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The Delfina Foundation, London’s largest international host and provider of international residencies, is staging a selling exhibition this October to raise funds to support the next generation of artists.
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Born in 1969 in Sheffield, United Kingdom, Martin Westwood lives and works in London. Creating installations, audio-visual pieces, sculptures and paper-based works, Westwood’s practice is concerned with the ways in which corporate and commercial modes of organization shape both personal and social behavior, affecting one’s interior life, memories and relationships while redefining notions of community and public exchange. His process often involves reproducing the automated everyday actions that normally spell productivity in the workplace: photocopying, shredding, and database entry. Through this process, he inserts himself into the commercial loop of production and distribution, developing his own idiosyncratic micro production line, which refashions the mass-produced and dispensable materials of business culture, from sales brochures, invoice sheets to computer mouse-pads, sales tables and statistical charts. Westwood transforms this office paraphernalia into singularly crafted works that petrify and expose the banalities and superstitions associated with commercial environments. By stripping this source material of its communication propaganda, Westwood’s mute objects and images become the surplus relics of a well-oiled profit-driven machine, revealing its inherent foreignness and alienating effects.
Martin Westwood has had recent solo exhibitions at Bloomberg Space, London (2009), SE 8 (gallery), London (2009), The Approach, London (2007 and 2008), Art Statements, Art 37 Basel (2006) and the Art Now Project Space, Tate Britain, London (2005). His work has also been shown as part of “Acute Melancholia” at Studio 44, Stockholm (2010), “The Things I Did and the Money I Spent” at British School at Rome, Rome (2009), “Prospects and Interiors: Recent acquisitions of sculptors’ drawings” at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2008), “Metropolis Rise” Shanghai and 798 Space, Beijing (2007), “CUT” at The Approach, London (2005) and “Reflections” at the Artuaca Kunsterfgoed Festival, Tongeren, Belgium (2004).
Martin Westwood is represented by The Approach, London.
For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art
