PRESS RELEASE
GERHARD MARX | Landscape would be the wrong word
Oct 14 – Nov 7, 2026
GERHARD MARX | Landscape would be the wrong word
14 October - 7 November
Exacting, intricate and intriguing, Gerhard Marx’s works pulse with energy and provide portals to new realms. While they are a comment on our natural environment, Marx says, "landscape would be the wrong word". Where landscape implies distance - a horizon to be gazed upon - these works do the opposite. "Instead of making a landscape, I'm making a place", he explains. Marx’s works invite not merely looking but also bodily encounter.
Marx has long been drawn to maps: interrogating how they project authority and shape the way we see the world. By folding, cutting and reassembling them, he opens new spatial possibilities and meaning. He also uses plant matter as both tool and subject in this exploration. Nasturtium stems, hydrangea heads and poppy stalks – gathered and dried - form delicate, unruly constellations.
When I draw with plants, I am drawing the world with the world. It is a turning; a moment in which the world folds in on itself to look at itself.
It is literally a ‘landscape drawing’, but without the distance implied by that tradition. It is a type of landscape drawing drawn from within. Drawn with the landscape.
I collect dried plant material from the world around me - the calligraphic lines of dried stems that collect underneath the nasturtiums, the straight lines and expressive leaves of the dead poppies by the fence. The tall, thin flower-stalks that remain in the space between road and forest after flowering.
I bring the physical world - in the form of dead plants - into the studio, and from these heaps of compost, I select lines and textures from which the drawings are composed. Each fragment is glued and burnished into the surface, then sanded down until almost just a trace remains.
I build each drawing slowly, branch by branch, root by root. It is as if it is growing - growing through grafting.
It becomes a thing that exists across the parts from which it is grafted. It feels like a type of world-making; ‘much of world-making consists of taking apart and putting back together’, says Nelson Goodman. I construct the image in this way, bit by bit as a re-arrangement, a re-membering, a ‘putting back together’, but differently. The plant material resists my will, it is unruly. It creates a mark that brings with it its own storied materiality. The resultant drawing is a highly mediated object, a dialogue between me and the plant material.
The herbarium – where plants are collected and stored for scientific reasons, has been a strong reference point to this body of work – both in practical and visual terms, but also as metaphor for the relationship between the physical world and our relation to it.
When a plant is uprooted, flattened against a backing board and incorporated into the herbarium - the plant enters a strange complexity. It remains a plant, but it becomes simultaneously - also a drawing of a plant. It loses its physicality. It is no longer just itself; it comes to stand for a whole species, a holotype. It transforms into a sign of itself, a drawing of itself. It enters language.
When I am constructing these works, I am working in the space between the physical, tactile world and how that physicality is lost to language, how it disappears into the familiar.
In response, I think of each of these works as an attempt at creating place.
Not landscape, that would be the wrong word.
It is not a representation of an ‘over-there’. It is not a ‘somewhere’ which I can survey, name, or claim to know. It is not an elsewhere from which I can extract. Instead, each of these works involve subtle (re)activations of an intimate space between the viewer and the object, the body and how it relates to its physical surrounds. The use and manipulation of perspective, and a sense of touch, implicates and interweaves the object with the body of the viewer. Place in this sense implies an intimate subjectivity, a merging of interiority with that which is outside, with the physical world. It is an animist sense of space, an embeddedness, an inhabitation.
The artworks imply spaces that are not there, they conjure one place within another. They suggest spaces that contradict and dialogue with the space around them. They bring fragments of the exterior world into the intimacy of each artwork, weaving between a sense of looking and a sense of touch.
These recent works consider practices in which the world is rethought, reconsidered, and remade through the act of drawing and representation; the sketch, the model, the floor plan and blueprint, the garden layout and modernist diagrammatic strategies affect that which it describes, by describing it differently, by describing what it might become.
Within this logic, the logic of ‘describing differently’, I explore alternative approaches to the tradition of depicting landscape. By employing various ‘spatial imaginaries’, landscape -for lack of a better word - is imagined as dimensional, layered, dense, immersive and enveloping. Not a background, but something more akin to Emanuele Coccia’s ‘sensitive space’, a conception of space as that which physically extends the body by making the world ‘sense-able’.
