Book Launch And Exhibition

Infinity Land Press is delighted to invite you to The ‘Infinity Land Press Book Launch and Exhibition’ at Babble.Jar event venue.

The event will feature the London book launch of:

'TO PUTREFACTION’

Martin Bladh - Text
Karolina Urbaniak - Photographs

Life performance by Martin Bladh and video presentation.

Private View
Sunday 14th July 6pm-10pm

Performance
8.30pm

Exhibition
14th July - 11 th August

To Putrefaction – Martin Bladh & Karolina Urbaniak

Martin Bladh text
Karolina Urbaniak photography
Foreword by Jeremy Reed

Putrefaction: disintegration of biological material (e.g. proteins) through the operation of microbes, disintegration of corpses (cadaver); the agents of putrefaction distinguish themselves partly through a (foul) distinctive smell: hydrogen sulphide, marcaptans, indole, skat-ole, phenol etc. Also appearing: methane, fatty acids, basic substances, usually poisonous, like neurine, putrescine, cadaverine and muscarine.

I chose to believe that several known (and less known artist) have turned the aesthetic destruction inwards by staging poetic suicides as a closure to a mayor body of work. Their lives would be read like straight lines, their works indicated as dots upon these lines which reach contextual perfection in death: the last masterpiece. The protagonist life becomes a real life drama, his action, work and achievements are enacted as chapters in a novel or tracks on a concept album. The final act of self-annihilation would be his last sublime creation. I fantasise about earning my own pedestal in this private pantheon of beauty. – Martin Bladh

About the Artists:

KAROLINA URBANIAK
Karolina Urbaniak (1982-) is a visual artist, graphic designer and professional photographer based in London. Manager of Pond Street Studios and coofunder of publishing company Infinity Land Press.

Karolina’s optimally individual brilliance follows Bacon’s signposting into the body as mutable resources, and even if you can download your genes on an app, you’ll never know inwardly who you are other than by imagining it. Decoding the human genome goes one way, creative individuality another. There’s a belief dating back to the alchemists, that base matter, the nigredo or putrefaction is simply the formative state of emergent gold, like a merger between two drug giants to establish a lucrative pharmaceutical suppressant. – Jeremy Reed

MARTIN BLADH
Martin Bladh (1976-) is a Swedish artist of multiple mediums. His work is dark, visceral, hypnotic and disturbing, laying bare themes of violence, obsession, fantasy, auto-eroticism, self-mutilation, domination, submission, narcissism. Further beyond that, there is also a tribal, base, essential quality to his work, a kind of saving grace which grounds his art and makes it rare and valid. Martin is also a founding member of the post-industrial band IRM, the musical avant-garde unit Skin Area and the publishing company Infinity Land Press.

There are not many who can transform a Bacon painting into their own, who can litter their work with the quotes of writers and philosophers and have those words seem more their own than their owners’. Martin Bladh can, and does. His arrangement of collages, his cut ups and pasting, his personal markings, all lend a uniqueness to what he does that is unmistakable: everything he produces signed with a signature that cannot be scrawled. Indeed, the work of Martin Bladh is just that, 'a work', an entire body, a Gesamtkunstwerk. His pieces can only be viewed separately, but they never make more sense than when seen within the context of his overall oeuvre. Through a bombardment of the senses, which comes from full exposure to Bladh's art, one acquires a kind of cognitive idea of his expression and no one part represents that better than the whole – the body. – Shane Levene