Virgil Marti (born 1962) is an American visual artist recognized for his installations blending fine art, design, and decor from a range of styles and periods.
Marti’s immersive sculptural environments, often evoking nature and the landscape, combine references from high culture with decorative, flamboyant, or psychedelic imagery, materials, and objects of personal significance.
Marti’s installation transformed the gallery into a “brazenly tacky” domestic interior set in the 1970s complete with a hot tub, “smoked mirrors, electric candle flames, and deep-pile shag”.
[18][19] Artforum critic Frances Richard notes, “In Marti’s deftly kitschy installation,...a number of interesting issues coalesce—domestic space as social palimpsest, the Warholian appeal of mass-produced taste, and an appreciation for what curator Lia Gangitano refers to as “the purgatory” of suburbia.
Most satisfying, however, is Marti’s understanding of the subtle ways in which a sculptural environment manipulates the physical perceptions of its audience.”[19] For his 2001 solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, juxtaposed with the museum’s 19th-century architecture designed by Frank Furness, Marti installed fluorescent wallpaper glowing under black-light, depicting a ‘psychedelic landscape’ of palm trees and waterfalls, which artist and critic Eileen Neff observed -- 'caused a visceral jolt'.
[23][9] Marti’s 2002 immersive installation Grow Room conjuring both Whistler's Peacock Room as well as ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, was the inaugural exhibition at New York’s Participant Inc.[24][25] Marti lined the walls with reflective Mylar screen printed with images of artificial flowers—poppies, roses, hydrangeas, among images of macrame spiderwebs based on scientific photographs “of webs spun by spiders who had been fed drugs.”[25] From the gallery’s ceiling, the artist suspended chandeliers made from colored resin casts of deer antlers with blossoms at the tips.
Reviewing the exhibition for The New York Times, critic Holland Cotter notes, “the outcome is a merging of pop culture, art history, weird science and adolescent fantasy.”[25] Marti presented a second version of Grow Room at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
[27] Utilizing his process for creating his own artworks, Marti mined the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection and restaged paintings, decorative art, and sculpture “knowingly confusing high and low, period and contemporary, formal and informal design.”[28][29] Marti’s arrangements were informed by some of his favorite films including ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’, ‘L’Avventura’, and 'Nashville'.
Marti’s ‘mirror’ façades have a trompe l’oeil wood grain surface and silver finish that captures only subtle shifts in light, thwarting the expectation of a true reflection.
Marti tints the mirrors in horizontal bands, “suggestive of Color Field paintings”, using colors that reference a range of inspirations including the dramatic skies in the paintings of Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, and James Hamilton, as well as “1960s counter-culture aesthetics.”[32] The Wadsworth installation “explored life and death" through an inventive evocation of an English garden with shrines, a faux natural setting embellished with “hippie-craft” elements, alongside Marti's sculptural faux wood furniture made from cement.
[39] Marti also included fabric poufs, ‘looking glasses’, and faux swag wallpaper in the 2019 group show Less is A Bore curated by Jenelle Porter at the ICA Boston.
[43] An element of landscape connected the works in the exhibition, which had at its center, a glass terrarium that Marti created in the 1970s, surrounded by bric-a-brac objects collected by the artist, a ‘horizon colored’ candle, stretched soda bottles, fabric poufs, a chandelier, and tire with a rainbow trim.