Danish artist
Born in Copenhagen 1964
Lives and works in Copenhagen

Martin Erik Andersen belongs to Generation X. Andersen’s works document the experience of displacement, alienation from what is supposed to be your own environment, your own life, your own home.

Hence Andersen comes to record with detachment the scene of a car crash, a scene in which his own father was involved, or himself wearing a Tibetan mask, or an Arab dog seen on travels, with the subtitle Home is where the buffalo roam… The buffalo of course have long done roaming, nomadism, the range are nostalgia trips. No home for this cowboy. Hah!

These are trivia games. Riddles. Hide and seek. Nothing is of real consequence. Things can be upside down and back to front, but this changes nothing. Reality is unimportant. A car crash and a funpark are equal. And yet….

All the while, despite the cynicism these works convey, they evoke a sense of distress – distress related more to the experience of the detachment itself than to the apparent subject matter. The marks which Andersen adds to photographs and scraps of paper are almost too deliberate; they seem desperate, a bid to make an aesthetic out of this decay.

In the world Andersen lives in, desensitisation to reality is a side effect of life itself.

Lost, he makes a scrap collection out of the scraps of his experience, attempting to mosaic them together into a whole to leave his mark, a type of bottled message in an art work. This is how it is, now what is it?

S.O.S.