Biography

Martin Noël (1956 Berlin-2010 Bonn) studied free graphics and painting at the Fachhochschule Köln, formerly Kölner Werkschulen, from 1980-87.

Several scholarships, including the scholarship for the German Study Center in Venice and the studio scholarship of the LETTER Foundation Cologne for New York inspired him to linoleum and woodcut series, which are often closely linked to his places of residence. On wanderings, Noël created a “fund of seeing,” consisting of sketches and photographs that served as the basis for the painterly, graphic, and printmaking work.

With the unmistakable line language of his works, the artist makes a highly individual contribution to the rediscovery and further development of the woodcut at the beginning of the 21st century. His art creates commitment: Noël succeeds in transferring the old, traditional medium into the art of the present.

He repeatedly suspends the traditional boundaries of genre by, among other things, beginning to elevate the printing blocks of his woodcuts to objects in their own right, which he refers to as “woods.” At the same time, the artist rescues the concept of the objet trouvé, which Marcel Duchamp already declared to be art in the 1910s, into printmaking by managing to perceive seemingly meaningless but special details in the everyday without actively searching for them.

On walks, for example, he detects cracks in the asphalt or structures in the branching branches of trees, which he reproduces in his works characterized by characteristic line compositions (Text by Klaus Albrecht Schröder, General Director Albertina, Vienna).