Virgil Marti

Marti received a B.F.A in painting from the School of Fine Arts at Washington University, and an M.F.A. in painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. In 1990 Marti studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.[2]

Marti was interested in challenging distinctions between fine art and decoration while studying painting at Tyler School of Art. He began stretching patterned fabrics onto customized painting stretchers creating painting-sculpture hybrids, some of which visually approximated cushions or furniture. Marti also stretched the fabric directly onto the wall, achieving the effect of wallpaper and forming an environment for the objects he was making.[9] Evolving from this early work, Marti experimented with designing and printing his own wallpaper while an apprentice at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1992. During this time, the artist produced his well-known work, Bully Wallpaper (1992) -- black-light sensitive “psychedelic-colored wallpaper” in French toile style, which in place of pastoral scenes, had yearbook portraits of all the boys who had tormented Marti in junior high school printed among its floral patterns.[10] The writer Samantha Dyllan Mitchell notes, “this project is a clear predecessor to [Marti’s] later endeavors, combining a serious devotion to style and design throughout history with a distinctly personal contemporary perspective.”[11] Marti’s Bully Wallpaper (1992) was first shown in the boiler room of the Community Education Center, Philadelphia and was conceived with this space in mind.[12][13] The work was later exhibited at the Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia in 1992. In 1999 the Holly Solomon Gallery displayed Marti’s Bully Wallpaper at the Armory Show.[10][2] In 2009 it was installed in the men’s room of Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum while Marti was a resident artist.[6]

In the early 1990s, Marti further incorporated decor into his artistic practice through collaborations with the artist Stuart Netsky. Netsky and Marti sewed fabric pillow shams embroidered with “one-line quotations culled from notorious figures of pop culture.” These Shams, presented as part of an installation, were a “tongue-in-cheek” commentary on queer culture and interior decoration.[14]

In 1995 Marti transformed a prison cell at the disused Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia for the exhibition Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/The Prison As Subject, organized by Julie Courtney and Todd Gilens.[15][16] Marti’s site-specific installation, For Oscar Wilde, was an homage to the writer imprisoned for moral indecency in 19th-century England.[6] Marti decorated the prison cell in a “William Morris-inspired design of Wilde’s day and fashioned an aesthetically pleasing cell...with beauty as one of its central themes.”[6] Nature, both organic and artificial, dominated Marti’s installation -- “a meandering path” made from a border of silk lilies in full bloom lead to the doorway of the cell where the walls were covered with silkscreen printed floral wallpaper of the artist’s design.[6]

Marti fabricated a full-scale immersive domestic environment for his first major installation created for the group show You Talkin’ To Me (1996) at the ICA Philadelphia.[17] A version of this installation, Hot Tub (1998) was shown New York City’s Thread Waxing Space in 1998. Marti’s installation transformed the gallery into a “brazenly tacky” domestic interior set in the 1970s complete with a hot tub, “smoked mirrors, electric candle flames, and deep-pile shag”.[18][19] Artforum critic Frances Richard notes, “In Marti’s deftly kitschy installation,...a number of interesting issues coalesce—domestic space as social palimpsest, the Warholian appeal of mass-produced taste, and an appreciation for what curator Lia Gangitano refers to as “the purgatory” of suburbia. Most satisfying, however, is Marti’s understanding of the subtle ways in which a sculptural environment manipulates the physical perceptions of its audience.”[19]

For his 2001 solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, juxtaposed with the museum’s 19th-century architecture designed by Frank Furness, Marti installed fluorescent wallpaper glowing under black-light, depicting a ‘psychedelic landscape’ of palm trees and waterfalls, which artist and critic Eileen Neff observed -- 'caused a visceral jolt'.[20][21][22] Neff writes, “the scene announced the kind of botanical anomalies Marti finds in the recollected landscapes of Frederic Church as well as the geographical peculiarities in some panoramas of nineteenth-century ‘scenics.’ But Marti’s take on transporting wallpaper also evoked the psychedelic vernacular of the ’60s and ’70s and awakened the viewer's sense of nostalgia.”[20]

By “pushing the decorative to visceral extremes, usually leading back to nature in some distorted form,” Marti’s installations offer a context where elements of decor and design recalled from his own upbringing or personal history, that are considered lowbrow, ugly, or flamboyant, can belong.[23][9]

In 2007, Marti exhibited sculptures in the form of bright, ornate chandeliers and dramatic gold 'bone curtains' in a joint exhibition with artist Pae White at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.[35]

In 2017 Marti’s work was featured in the Barnes Foundation’s exhibition, Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie.[36] The artist created two identical circular 'poufs' --banquettes-in-the-round upholstered in a mixture of textured fabrics. Marti’s poufs often function as symbolic portraits in the artist’s installations.[37][38] Marti titled the Barnes’ work Doppelganger (2017), installing one of the plush poufs in the Barnes Collection Gallery for the duration of the exhibition, while its 'twin' traveled to four indoor and outdoor locations across the city of Philadelphia.[39]

Marti also included fabric poufs, ‘looking glasses’, and faux swag wallpaper in the 2019 group show Less is A Bore curated by Jenelle Porter at the ICA Boston.[40][41][42]

In 2019 Marti was the subject of a solo exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI.[43] An element of landscape connected the works in the exhibition, which had at its center, a glass terrarium that Marti created in the 1970s, surrounded by bric-a-brac objects collected by the artist, a ‘horizon colored’ candle, stretched soda bottles, fabric poufs, a chandelier, and tire with a rainbow trim.[43]

In 2000, Marti’s large-scale public artwork Couch (2000), a 30-foot long upholstered sofa with tasseled throw pillows was installed in the Ardmore Station, Ardmore, PA.[44] In 2013 Marti’s large-scale sculptural installation Five Standards (Dazzle) was permanently installed at Philadelphia’s Navy Yards.[45] Marti’s sculpture Anomalous Cloud made of polished stainless steel and mirrored acrylic, suggesting an “abstracted thought bubble”, floats like a “geometric cloud” from the ceiling of the 36th floor of the Comcast Technology Center building in Philadelphia.[46] A chandelier by Marti is on long-term loan to the ICA Philadelphia and is currently installed in the entrance to the museum.[47][48]

Virgil Marti's work has been exhibited at institutions including White Columns, New York; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Participant Inc., New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Visual Arts Center, Richmond; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville; Montreal Biennial, Montreal; The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; MoMa P.S. 1, New York. Marti has had exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia.[49][8]

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1962, Marti currently lives in Philadelphia.[2]

• https://www.academia.edu/28606082/Auther_Wallpaper_the_Decorative_and_Contemporary_Installation_Art
• https://www.thewadsworth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/WA-MATRIX-167-Brochure-4.1-pages-FINAL.pdf
• https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/1881390160
• https://hirshhorn.si.edu/dynamic/archives/Directions_Virgil_Marti_Pae_White.pdf
• https://update.comcast.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/dlm_uploads/2019/10/ComcastTechnologyCenter.pdf