(forgive the pun).

Swiss artist MARCK makes ‘video sculptures’- a good way to describe the remarkable pieces he creates. He uses a range of different screens for his high-resolution moving image works and situates them inside sculptural forms that range from exquisite to whimsical.

I saw MARCK’s works at the Blue Rider gallery in Mayfair, London. I just happened to be passing by on a gallery day with my friend who was visiting from France. We wanted to have a day of contemporary art, but instead of the usual east-end ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ galleries, we decided to check out Mayfair, and we’re glad we did. Two galleries were particularly outstanding that day, Bluerider with the MARCK show and the very different Shizuko Yoshikawa at Marlborough Gallery.

The exhibition features Shizuko Yoshikawa’s relief sculptures, paintings, sketches, and conceptual colour studies over four decades. Few women became as distinguished as Yoshikawa did in the 20th century’s Constructivist and Concrete Art movements, but still she’s not that wellknown today. Now, with the global focus on reintroducing Abstract Avant-Garde women artists, Shizuko Yoshikawa’s creative work has earned new attention.

She was the only female Japanese student at the Bauhaus Ulm School of Design (1953–1968), created by postwar geometric abstraction pioneer Max Bill.

As a teenager, Shizuko met major individuals in the progressive design movement and “International Style,” including the Argentinean Tomás Maldonado, the Ulm school’s rector, while she was working co-organizing the World Design Conference (WoDeCo) in Tokyo in 1960. Later, Yoshikawa’s relief permutations and mathematical compositional technique showed the influence of Maldonado’s teachings as well as her own interest in science and system theory.

Her architectural works, which took advantage of site-specific light and shadow, inspired the artist’s wall reliefs and sculptures. Their layered tectonic structure evokes pre-Columbian reliefs and other indigenous abstract languages from around the planet. The exhibition featured really interesting architectural models fwhich show Yoshikawa’s mathematical correctness alongside her distinctive imagination.

Yoshikawa developed her own controlled abstract style, with multi-dimensional optical phenomena in a distinctive colour sense, which runs from powerful purple, blue, orange, and green to pastels.

MARCK (@marck_videosculptures) is one of the best video artists I have seen lately. Video art has the ability to be absolutely boring and interminable or completley silly. I can’t say I welcome seeing videos in an art space, and some of the worst stuff finds its way into galleries. This is sad because I love video and I think it’s an amazing and versatile medium. So it was with great joy that I came across MARCK’s work!

I don’t know much about this Zurich-based artist, but he is very inventive. I can see the influence of pioneers such as Nam June Paik, but there is a contemporary sense of humour as well. His pieces often involve humans struggling against a confined space, but while this is poignant, it’s not horrific or disturbing. In fact it is relatable. Whom of us has not felt ourselves to be ‘in a box’ so to speak?

You could say that Marck's pieces offer a microcosmos, because they show how we deal with feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity in time and place. We're always having to navigate the limits of living and dealing with the restrictions of life. It's quite easy to relate to and imagine Marck's video art, but that doesn't mean the art is itself easy. Instead, it's amazingly technically competent and aesthetically pleasing. It makes you think.

In completely different ways, both MARCK and Shizuko Yoshikawa offered ways of thinking about space, environment, colour and the way the human form reacts to both. Yoshikawa’s abstraction invites contemplation and musing on texture and form. Without touching the art work we felt the visceral textures of the abstract works, especially the relief pieces.

Feeling by imagination was also strongly present in MARCK's work - imagining being immersed in his video sculptures - being squashed into the sardine can or trapped in a continually- tilting frame, or being eternally plunged into the watery pool. What the eye sees, the skin feels. It's quite a sensation!

Marlborough London
6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY

Bluerider ART London·Mayfair
47 Albemarle St, London, W1S 4JW