Most recently Frederik Marks has started to merge photography with sculpture. He has always been interested in interacting with what he photographs, for example by lighting found objects in a specific way or removing items in order to create a better composition. Naturally, he continued to interact more and more with what he was photographing, removing himself further and further from documentary photography.
Currently, he is working on a series of photographs of sculptures that aim to blur the viewer’s sense of time and scale. In his photographs, small sculptures made of fox bones, epoxy clay and latex, appear as tall, much bigger sculptures made from washing machine tubes, plaster and caramel or epoxy. He has also started to take photos of the process as well as the finished object in order to give the sculptures a sense of flux. On some finished sculptures, he has used caramel as an epoxy substitute, which remains in a slow constant flow. This state of flux gives his photographs an agency to exist. They not only document the work but also become part of it by pointing out the changing nature of his sculptures.
Thematically he is dealing with themes of morbidity and torture: Some small objects are hung from metal chains, and other taller sculptures resemble imaginary torture devices. Especially the taller sculptures should also express an inner conflict: The metal chains of the sculptures dominate the organic parts by pulling and disfiguring the plaster parts in a certain direction.
In the gallery space, he tries to juxtapose the actual sculptures with work-in-progress photographs. This adds another dimension to the work because in a way the sculptures face their own past within the space.
Frederik Marks is a Berlin-based artist who explores themes of instability and morbidity through photography and sculpture. After graduating from the London College of Communication in 2020 he joined the photography collective Visual Wellness in Berlin. Frederik has been nominated for several awards, including the Youth shortlist of the Sony World Photography Awards 2017 and the Palm* Photo Prize in 2021.
Frederik’s work was on view at the group exhibition ‘Living above the lines’ at Haunt in Berlin:
