No Reflections
No Reflections (2009) is a major installation by Scottish artist Martin Boyce, originally commissioned for Scotland + Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Installed across seven interconnected rooms of a 15th-century Venetian palazzo, the work transformed the space into an imagined "abandoned garden" — a poetic interior landscape composed of sculptural elements that blur distinctions between architecture, nature, memory, and decay.
The installation featured a constellation of newly created works, including suspended aluminium trees, scattered wax-paper leaves, timber stepping-stones, tables and benches, and other sculptural interventions that echoed the faded grandeur of the palazzo. Boyce drew inspiration from the modernist "concrete trees" created by Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which he has long cited as a key reference point in his practice.
After Venice, No Reflections was reconfigured for exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where the works were adapted to the clean modernity of the gallery while maintaining its themes of displacement, interior/exterior collapse, and atmospheric melancholy.
The installation featured a constellation of newly created works, including suspended aluminium trees, scattered wax-paper leaves, timber stepping-stones, tables and benches, and other sculptural interventions that echoed the faded grandeur of the palazzo. Boyce drew inspiration from the modernist "concrete trees" created by Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which he has long cited as a key reference point in his practice.
After Venice, No Reflections was reconfigured for exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where the works were adapted to the clean modernity of the gallery while maintaining its themes of displacement, interior/exterior collapse, and atmospheric melancholy.
