Drawings from the serie
The Scent of a Woman series, 2006
Martin Skauen (1975 SE)
Trained at Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway
Lives and works in Oslo
It is an apocalyptic and wounded world that Martin Skauen depicts in his artwork. His subjects consist often of the naked and mutilated bodies of people and animals linked one to another in various ways. With hints of humour and irony he makes reference to some existing pictorial world, religion maybe, or spirituality, Greek mythology or pornography. In his works Skauen stages different situations in which the figures also serve as metaphors representing differing mental states.
Martin Skauen’s recent work has mainly focused on drawing but he worked previously in such other media as video and music. Together with four of his male artist colleagues from Norway he founded the
Tegneklubben in 2004. The idea with the club is simply to meet, drink beer and nibble cheese snacks while sketching and discussing art. The sketching is conducted on the spot and spontaneously, and the outcome is an uncensored flow of drawings on white A4 sheets.
The work
What Goes Around Comes Around is suggestive of a so-called zoetrope – a cylinder with vertical slits containing a row of still pictures. When the zoetrope is revolved it gives the impression of movement.
Martin Skauen is influenced by pop culture – strip cartoons and films of violence – but also by art historical depictions of death and destruction such as those painted by the Renaissance artists Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel.
What Goes Around Comes Around, 2008
Aluminium wheel, 200 cm diameter, 36 cm tall, drawings
Courtesy: Laura Bartlett Gallery
The Scent of a Woman series, 2006
Series of seven framed drawings, 100 x 70 cm