Drunk Brown House

de Helen Marten, Serpentine Sackler Gallery Staff

'Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House' at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery brought together work never before presented in London with new work in an installation that was conceived specifically in relation to the Gallery. Combining sculpture, text and screen-printed paintings, Martens practice comprises images and objects, often playing with two and three-dimensionality. Her installations employ visual and linguistic ambiguity in order to explore the potential for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Martens sculptural installations often serve as repositories for disparate material combinations, resulting in an exhibition that called into question our changing relationship to the readymade. Underscored by a process of collaged abstraction, her assemblages resonate with associative meaning. Creating a string of hieroglyphs or a kind of archaeological anagram, the works encrypted sequences are nevertheless driven by their own internal logic.