Martin Klug
Drawings to die Künstlichen
Drawing
Front Gallery

Canadian Artist

PRESS RELEASE

Martin Klug, a Toronto artist born in St. Paul, Minnesota, came to Canada in 1968. He has studied at York University, Queen's University, and Nova Scotia School of Art and Design.

His exhibition "Drawings to die Künstlichen" consists of large drawings in pencil and graphite dealing with a personal and historical symbolism. They will be on display from August 15 - September 7, 1981 in the Front Gallery.

Klug's punk art is unpardonable

(unknown newspaper source, August 1981)

Martin Klug's drawings on view in the front gallery of Mercer Union, are punk post-punk, and very interesting as anthropological artifacts. They are also examples of what the current disarray of standards and values in the art world has made possible.

Punk art, as practiced in New York and Toronto, has been an art of jailbreak as grand gesture: pubescent nihilism so fashionable it makes the Dick Cavett show. However ludicrous most punk art may be, it has nevertheless provided an interesting stylistic vocabulary for people fed up with formal art education to use when they want to talk dirty.

Klug, an art historian by training, scrawls and smudges petulantly on cheap poster-paper (unframed and stuck up on the wall--what else?), draws people with the abandon of a psychopath or a toddler, crushes together imagery into little visual disaster areas.

Some artists, such as Ed Radford and John Scott, have steered these mannerisms, with very good effect, toward humanistic social commentary. Martin Klug, however, has recruited punk into the ranks of camp. His drawings are all frills and style, no structure. They do allude nostalgically to historic styles, but stop short of invoking the historic artistic problems. They are rude, but it's a picturesque, limp-wristed rudeness that just loves to be loved.

Like drag queens, these drawings are made attractive by their tacky extravagance, and by their bitchiness and bravado. But there's one thing Martin Klug shall not be pardoned for. Across some these pictures he has scribbled the worst of the great art scholar, Erwin Panofsky giving his New Wave omelets a sudden and totally deceptive whiff of high seriousness.

Cad! That's like making Northrop Frye write press releases for Teenage Head.