Gerhard Marx / Lessons in Looking Down / 2013

Gerhard Marx’s solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg – Lessons in Looking Down – takes its name from a chapter in Jules Verne’s book A Journey to the Center of the Earth. In the book, two geologists discover a potential route into the centre of the Earth, and prepare for their decent by taking ‘lessons in looking down’. They visit Copenhagen in order to climb the corkscrew spire of the Church Of Our Saviour, which has steps that spiral on the outside of the spire, offering extensive views of the city. Five days are spent on the tower, looking down from that height until they can do so without being frightened, without their heads ‘swimming’.

Geology, like drawing, is an exploration largely bound to the surface. Verne describes a rehearsal in which the geologists attempt to overcome the fear of falling by staring down onto the surface of the earth. Even as they stare themselves out at the vastness of their vista, they are also imagining themselves as piercing the crust, as entering the map. Instead of reading the earth’s surface as a boundary, they anticipate the depths of what might lie below.

Marx’s Lessons in Looking Down explores representations of the structures that the bare eye cannot see. He focuses on the structures that hold or shape the fluid aspects of existence; the ribcage that holds the soft, near shapeless interior of the body, the city structure that funnels and facilitates the flows of lives lived together. Marx literally brings the informational abstractions of aerial views, maps, and anatomical illustrations into his physical world by using plant material from his immediate environment as medium. The techniques that Marx develops to do this are at once practical, poetic and conceptual strategies by which he draws the world with the world. His works are labour intensive reconstructions that rely on fragments to construct intimate immensities, works that meticulously scratch at the surface to reveal an ecstatic vastness beneath.