Martin Roth (artist)

Martin Roth (October 2, 1977 in Graz – June 14, 2019 in New York City^[1]) was an Austrian artist living and working in New York City, USA after earning a master's degree from Hunter College in 2011. He was married to Josephine Nash,^[2] the director of Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery.

Work

Much of Roth's work revolved around the introduction of living organisms into a setting or situation circumscribed by the artist. He used living organisms as a stand in for humans, to show that they're also characters caught in conditions where they don't have control."^[3][4][5][4] His work, while frequently ephemeral or temporary,^[4] is saturated in space.^[6][5] On one level, there is the physical dimension of spaces large,^[7] and small: from the quaint miniature landscapes or rocks and plants inside glass cages,^[4][8] housing lizards^[9] or mice^[10] to the compact grid of a lavender field^{[11][12][13][14]} shaped by the artist's arrangement in a white cube; from the beautiful patterned garden of Persian rugs sprouting verdant grass,^[3][12][15] or the tepid lagoon created by flooding a gallery space,^[6][16][17] to the thrust of a cherry sapling through a laminate surface,^[4][18] demonstrating the interplay between an exposed space above and subterranean space^[19][20] below that characterizes several of Roth's installations.^[7] These physical settings often interweave with or generate acoustic spaces^[21][22][17] to create the conditions for – and are, in turn, shaped by – the natural organism that inhabit them.^[4][16] His work can be large-scale and particular to a site,^[4][11][10] the fact that it requires the nurture^[23] of living organisms^[4][14] renders it strangely intimate and invites the viewer if not to engage directly,^[24][17] at least to consider his or her relationship to the work on a human scale.^[25][4] Roth interrogated the increasingly blurry line between human and nonhuman systems.^[26]