Small Isms 2022

MARTIN GEORGE born 1980

Small Isms 2022

aluminium, roller bearing, epoxy coating
227.0 x 90.0 x 90.0 cm
unique

Provenance:
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Historical Movements, Lennox St. Gallery, Melbourne, 31 July - 18 August 2024
Modernists Anonymous, Lennox St. Gallery, Melbourne, 21 August - 8 September 2024

EXHIBITED IN MELBOURNE

Estimate: $16000 - 22000

Martin George is a contemporary Australian sculptor, whose body of work is imbued with his ironic sense of humour and desire to subvert artistic traditions. 

Small Isms is a unique work, forming part of George’s Isms series which involves his monumental aluminium sculptures being desecrated and recontextualised in a potent display of distress and insurrection. The series interrogates the intersection of performance art and modern sculpture, with the artist both creating and dismantling the sculptures. George describes the Isms series as ‘an enquiry into monumentality, fragmentation, and the politics of sculptural form.’¹

Lost Isms from the same series was exhibited in the Personal Structures exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The sculpture/performance hybrid was staged in three chapters. First, the large, twisting aluminium form stood proud as a pure example of modern sculpture for several months in the Giardini della Marinaressa. The second chapter saw the artist ceremoniously fell the sculpture using an axe and carry the ‘sacked monument’ to the Palazzo Mora. The third and final instalment was the sombre display of Lost Isms lying on the gravel, cut wounds to its base, questioning the role of contemporary art in the troubled modern world. George conducted a similar project as part of the Lorne Sculpture Biennale in 2018. 

The artist describes Small Isms as follows:

Small Isms was materially altered and reassembled for the Historical Movements exhibition at Lennox Street Gallery. Installed on a rotating base, it invites a dynamic, performative viewing experience that foregrounds themes of mobility, transformation, and dance. This version is conceptually and materially distinct from Lost Isms, exhibited in the Personal Structures exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, though both works share genealogical and theoretical linkages.²

Writer and fellow sculptor Ken Scarlett highlights the unexpected playfulness of George’s practice: ‘While Martin George can undoubtedly make a totally convincing piece of modernist sculpture, viewable from all directions and immaculately constructed, he also likes in catching the spectator unawares. Things are frequently not quite as they first seem.’³ Small Isms exemplifies this in its clever juxtaposition of the grand form and the rotating base, making the heavy sculpture suddenly seem as light as a ballerina on pointe. 

Footnotes:

1. Martin George in correspondence with the author, 2 May 2025
2. Ibid.
3. Scarlett, K., ‘Expect the Unexpected’, Martin George [exhibition catalogue], Kraftwerk Berlin, Berlin, 2016, p.2

Asta Cameron

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