Mårten Lange is a Swedish artist and bookmaker
Episode 373: Mårten Lange is a Swedish artist I have been deeply inspired by. His work is complex and has minimal traits that sound oxymoronic in principle, but when you see the work, it makes sense.
Mårten’s early work and books focused on the natural world and its phenomena. Deceptively “simple” images of nature, when collated by the artist, begin to ask more significant questions about humanity and its relationship to the world and the production of the philosophy of how anthropocentrism acts as a catalyst for differentiating ourselves from the world we inhabit and its other species. The images are reduced and clean and ask us to consider the natural subject matter worthy of much longer contemplation.
From this point, Mårten’s work has evolved into a dystopian, almost sci-fi portrayal of architecture, economy, and technology. Though this strand of his thinking was present in early books like Machina, it came to full fruition in his books The Mechanism (MACK) and Ghost Witness (Loose Joints). Though undeclared, one removes a palpable sense of a daunting futurism in which people are dwarfed by megacities and the cracks between urban dwellings and technology begin to crack and reveal something unnatural at work.
His new book, Threshold (KARL), just published, looks at trace elements of human activity found in rooms and domestic environments. He has left the outside world and begun investigating transience, trace, and a strange type of disappearance that forensically suggests gravitational change and upheaval. It looks to be one of the most promising volumes of the year. Please Tune In. Mårten is a true talent and someone I gravely respect.
