Edited by Matilde Casaglia – Art and Culture Editor matilde.casaglia@positive-magazine.com
Artworks by Edgar Martins http://www.edgarmartins.com
The Wapping Project Bankside is currently hosting, until the 30th June 2012, a photography exhibition entitled “This is not a house”, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine.
The artist is called Edgar Martin, born in Portugal but grown up in Macau, China. In 1996 he moved in the UK, where he is still living, in order to attend an MA in photography and fine art at the Royal College of Art.
This is not a House is a project with an interesting social aspect, and it is evident that it had an important meaning to the artist despite the fact of being the result of a commission.
It all started in 2008, when the New York Times magazine asked the photographer to represent the crisis of mortgage industry as well as the collapsing impact on the real estate market in the States.
Edgar Martins then decided to analyse the problem by using an artistic point of view instead of taking a documentary photojournalistic approach. He uses fiction to explain reality. By setting out to photograph abandoned and ruined homes, golf courses, hotels, even banks to express the crisis. As he stated, his project can be defined as ‘a photographic intervention into a crisis, a crisis that is only in part economic’.
When “This is not a house” was first published in 2009, it created a feisty debate consequently to his way of reshaping with detailed digital techniques some of the images.
Edgar Martins exposed his artworks all over the world, recent exhibitions include the 54th Venice Biennale, Museum of Electricity, Lisbon, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, Belém Cultural Centre (Lisbon) and the Centro Cultural Hélio Oiticia (Rio de Janeiro).
After being hosted at the Wapping Project Of London, the exhibition will move in 2013 to the Tullie House Art Gallery & Museum and the Ffotogallery (Wales).
