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biography
KENNETH MARTIN was born in Sheffield (Great Britain) 1905. He died in London in 1984. After attending a local art school, Martin continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Right from the start in addition to painting he did graphic and design work. His first non-figurative paintings, in 1948, already reveal what was to become the main theme of his research: movement as a generator of forms by means of translation, rotation, winding. In 1951 he began to develop his research in three dimensions, though remaining concerned with the relationship of movement and construction. The "Kinetic constructions" are assemblies of similar elements according to certain rhythms, mostly centered on a vertical axis. The rhythm of subsequent constructions is generally given by the translation of mathematical formulas or proposition into a modular and proportional progression. The kinetic or motory factor seeks to demonstrate how, maintaining constant the rhythmic order, the forms can change. Towards the end of the 1960s he started -with a large series of drawings, paintings and graphs -to investigate the relationship between casualty and order. No initial program was given: the starting-point was a random series of numbers which were then organized on the plane in unforeseeable ways, which, however, maintained unaltered the initial numerical rhythm. A series of drawings on this theme was published in 1973 in a volume titled Chance and order. Martin's vast output can be classified according to the following themes: mobile reflectors and screwings, rings, lines in space, linear constructions, parabolic screws, tunnels, transformables, variables, rotating rings, chain systems, chance and order. He has also applied his sculpture to urban environments. Martin has held numerous exhibitions, above all in England, where he has long been considered an artist of major international prestige. His work was shown in the "British Painting" exhibition at the Arts Council in 1958, at the "Bewogen Beweging" exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1961, at the "Nove Tendencija 3" exhibition in Zagabria in 1965, at the "Dokumenta 4" exhibition at Kassel in 1968. In 1970-71 his work, together with Mary Martin's, was chosen for the "Arts Council tour of Great Britain." In 1970 and 1974 he had exhibitions at the Waddington Gallery in London. In 1975 a large retrospective exhibition of Martin's work was held at the Tate Gallery in London. The coherence and mathematical clarity of his work has brought him many tokens of official recognition, among them the degree honoris causa of the Royal College of Art and, at the Congress of Verucchio in 1965, the gold medal of the Presidency of the Italian Council of Ministers. His theoretical writings, numerous and important, have been published in magazines like Studio International and Leonard. In 1974 the Viking Press of New York published his Construction from Within: The Tradition of Constructivism.
exhibitions