Rhys Martin is an Australian visual artist, painter, and theatre maker based between Groß Köris, Germany, and Thines, France. Having studied Fine Arts and Literature at the University of Sydney, he spent several decades as a freelance choreographer, director, before finally appointed as Professor of Dance and Choreography at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) Germany. In 2020, he returned to his foundational visual arts practice, translating his extensive work in movement, rhythm, and spatial composition into drawing and painting.
About
My practice approaches image-making less as static composition than as staging, in line with my experience as a choreographer, theatre director, and maker: establishing conditions in which images emerge, shift, and reorganise over time. Informed by a long career in performance, theatre, and dance, I treat painting and drawing as unstable fields structured through perception, rhythm, and form.
An interest in dynamics, spatial composition, and text leads me to view my works as staged micro-performances. Fundamentally improvised, they rely on an intuitive thread weaving together a wide range of influences, from cultural memes to aesthetic precedents, using traces, diagrammatic gestures, and graphic scores to both suggest sense and poetic mystery.