‘Upside down, Boy you turn me, Inside out, and round and round’

Martin Creed, the English born, Scottish bred artist is well known as the ‘lights-on, lights-off’ Turner Prize winning sensation. Over the years he has consciously made works of art that use the exact amount of materials like Work No.201, half the air in a given space where he calculated the amount of air in a room, then filled balloons with exactly half the air and unloaded them into the space.  Out of a simple experiment like measuring the density of air, Work No.201 exhilarated even the most modest of humans, as they bounced around in squeals of delight on Creed’s sea of latex.

Martin Creed, London, 1998. Photograph by Mary BaroneReturning to New York this weekend for his third solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise (GBE), Creed will continue to wow the masses creating a spectacular site-specific installation remaking the entire gallery floor at GBE’s 620 Greenwich Street space with a horizontal arrangement of more than 100 types of marble from around the world all sourced through a foundry in Carrera, Italy.  Creed said he likes to think of the piece as the whole world, a line that forms a linear equation of a permanent installation he created in 2003 to inaugurate the GBE space when it relocated from 15th Street to 620 Greenwich Street. Work No 300: the whole world + the work = the whole world, a black painted text wrapping around the corner of the GBE building’s white brick façade is a mission statement, a manifesto declaring the continuity between artistic gesture and everyday life.

Seven years later, GBE will inaugurate another space, a gallery expansion into the old LaFrieda Meat Purveyors building next door at 601 Washington where Creed will premiere a new work: a film of an erection, a 35mm black and white film of the torso of a naked man in profile achieving an erection. Like a time-lapsed photographic study of manhood, a film of an erection is accompanied by a new chromatic composition by Creed played by a live violinist from the Manhattan School of Music during the run of the exhibition. He will also show Work No.909, a black stage curtain calibrated to open and close at regular intervals.  The three separate rigorously time-based artworks have not been sequenced and will take on natural rhythms.  While the violinist moves up and down a 12-note scale, the curtains will flowingly open and close all the while the film of a man’s penis slowly rises up and down.  States of flux never felt so tranquil.

Martin Creed in rehearsal with violinist Akiko Kobayashi at the newly expanded Gavin Brown enterprises (GBE), 601 Washington, New York City, May 7, 2010 (photograph by Mary Barone)Martin Creed at Gavin Brown’s enterpise (GBE) opens May 9, 2010 with a reception for the artist from 4-6pm.  The exhibition will be on view through June 19, 2010. http://www.gavinbrown.biz/