ONLINE: Stephen Fleischman Lectureship

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courtesy the artist

Sculptor and performance artist Martin Kersels.

A California native and graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, Martin Kersels is a sculptor, performance artist and videographer who often uses himself as a subject in his projects, which have been exhibited around the world. His first solo exhibition took place at the Madison Art Center, the forerunner to today's Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and Kersels will give a Facebook Live talk on his work and relationship to Madison as part of the lecture series named for retired director Stephen Fleischman.

press release:

About the Artist: Martin Kersels was born in Los Angeles, California. After he graduated with an undergraduate degree in art from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1984, he became a founding member of the collaborative performance group SHRIMPS. This group worked together on movement-based performances until 1993. Returning to UCLA for his MFA from 1992 to 1995, he began to create dynamic sculptures—both intimate and large, still and full of movement—as well as photography that documented performative moments, and videos that presented his body as an object. 

His interest in machines, entropy, sound, and dissolution has produced work that examines the dynamic tension between failure and success, the individual and the group, and the thin line between humor and misfortune. Since 1995, Kersels’ objects and projects have been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including the 1997 and 2010 Whitney Biennials, the Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Pompidou Brussels, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tinguely Museum, Kunsthalle Bern, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) in Geneva, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. His work is represented by the galleries Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, Redling Fine Arts in Los Angeles, and Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris.   

For the last eight years, he has been a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art. He lives and works in the New Haven-area of Connecticut. 

For more information on Kersels' work, visit MMoCA's Martin Kersels Teaching Page.

Registrations are not required for this event, and viewers need not have a Facebook account to attend. Simply visit the link below to enjoy the lecture.