Reviews

Lenore Hershey

 

  Dolls of another mood are the new artistic medium of a 24-year-old German girl named Irena Martens, and if we hadn’t met her at a one – woman  Castagno Gallery show in New York, we’d think it was A put-up  job. How can such a blonde, stylish smasher ( she used to be a  model in Milan) create such elegantly ugly grotesques? She says her stuffed doll creatures , with their  inhuman Features and caricature bodies  are “honest dolls”. These shock-pop playthings have already found themselves in some important art collections.

 

The Berkshire Eagle
Art Review-1979
Winifred Bell

I was impressed with Irena Martens’ relief sculpture last year; this year I am ecstatic.

Her total production since last summer consists of just five works: each more imaginative than the one before. Each is a life size female figure cut from smoothly finished pieces of plywood that fit together like clothing patterns. Martens’ head is obviously filled with an encyclopedia of art history. She plucks imagery from myriad sources and adapts it to her own unique needs.

   In one work, “Beauty and the Beast,” vivid multi-red patterns with gold overlays in the sleek gown (which could have been created by the Art Nouveau painter
Gustav Klimt) are combined with an Egyptian  style collar and headdress .The mournful face with huge eyes was  obviously inspired by a late Egyptian –early roman mummy case portrait. The lady’s forehead is adorned with a floer, and one of her cast human hands  holds a chain to which an animated dog is attached. He is painted flatly in bright semi gloss red and his single front view eye in his profile face has its traditions in ancient Egypt and 20^th Century Picasso.

   Each of martens’ pieces in this exhibition is different in mood. “Juggler” has a pet cat draped around her shoulders which has whimsically caught one of the flying balls in its mouth. The cat glances surreptitiously at his it’s mistress, whose face is tense with concentration.

   “Roswitha” is a gentle hooded lady whose dog licks her fingers.

Like all of the works in this show, she was executed  with precision and numerous small, surprise details.

    Martens’ work combines the fascination of fairy tales with intricate imagery and meticulous craftsmanship. Pure Delight !

 

 

The Berkshire Eagle
8-19-77
Art review – Winifred Bell
“Surrealism and ceramics”

Irena Martens deals in the stylized human form executed in wood and embellished with oval shaped white plaster faces that come straight out of the early Italian Renaissance.

  These life-size figures are as rigid as architectural columns. Their frontal attitudes are a composite of the beginnings of  many cultural periods; both sophisticated and primitive. They are finished with mystic symbols, meticulously and skillfully achieved.

  For example, “Lady in Armor” is covered in neatly scalloped sheets of bronze, mermaid fashion. A basket mask is hinged onto her expressionless pale face and connected to it are a number of raffia ribbons or strings. At the end of each is a tiny graceful bronze hand which rests comfortably somewhere on her metal chest. The hands and their connections form a looping decorative pattern which the lady wears like jewelry.

  In many of Marten’s works,, the wood armature is composed of curved pieces that  fit together as a jigsaw puzzle and are carefully sanded so that the natural grain and color  is  apparent. “Lady of Feathers” reminds  me of the magnificent capes the Hawaiians created for their royalty, in which they turned the intricate patterns found in plumage into beautiful geometric arrangements.

 

  In view of Marten’s biographical information – she was born in Germany and studied throughout Europe- it is not likely that our most western state  had an influence; nevertheless, she arrived at similar imagery.

  Martens changes her idiom somewhat in the figure titled “Cabaret.” A small-headed, huge shouldered man with deep set dark eyes holds a black crow in his hand. He is clothed almost entirely in shimmering buttons. He forbodes evil or perhaps he is meant to combat it.

 

There are also several smaller pieces  on display. “Doll Mother” with commercial baby bottle nipples in the correct  anatomical  locations and “The Leer” with an unbelievable smile are particularly interesting.

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John Gruen

 

  Irena Martens “Castagno “, 43 E. 80^th 

This is an exhibition of dolls –but with a difference  The dolls are personages of wild and woolly design, Created by an artist who sees these creatures as disquieting symbols of a disquieting age. Often outrageously garbed; sometimes deformed, the toy aspect  f these works is simply  a matter of first-impression. When incorporated  in box  constructions, the dolls assume a strange “Balthusian” aura- pointing to an imagination as florid as it is fertile.