NILS ERICHSEN MARTIN

Nils Erichsen Martin is a ceramicist producing graphic, figurative sculptures and bas-reliefs infused with the playful gestures and signs of everyday identity. Martin’s aesthetic lifts from consumer culture, Cubism, drawn animation, and graphic advertisement. Often comic in appearance, his porcelain and stoneware troupe of characters is comprised of martial artists and skateboarders, snooker players and pranksters, among a host of other personas. As participants in street sports and youth subcultures, these characters perform an irreverent and flippant nonchalance, often posing and showing off or reclined in supine indolence. Cartoon-like, their jagged haircuts, elongated fingers, cylindrical limbs, and rounded body parts set them apart. Occasionally, Martin returns to the smooth curves of these sculptures, incorporating drawings on the porcelain surface with oxide pencils. The division between two-dimensional perspective and three-dimensional rendering is muddied, each glimpse of a character superimposed on a subsequent one, giving the impression of dynamic motion as in a comic strip, a kickboxing match, or a strobe-lit music video.

Martin holds a masters degree in ceramics from the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry. He has exhibited widely in Norway and internationally, including at the CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art, the Kunstbanken Art Museum, the Sørlandet Art Museum, the Jingdezhen Ceramic University Art Museum, the Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. From 1994–95, he was a visiting artist at the Leedy/Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, MO. Martin received the ten-year national grant for established artists in 2014 and again in 2023.