Martina Lindqvist was chosen by Modus Operandi to design a building wrap stretched across the façade of a building under development on New Burlington Street, W1. Lindqvist is an emerging artist known for photographic works that draw on the emotive effects of real and constructed landscapes. She uses the natural world as a tool through which to explore key themes such as belonging, memory, and perception.
For this commission, Lindqvist travelled to Scotland and the landscape in the northwest of the country forms the basis of her imagery. The resulting digitally manipulated artwork, The Absurdity of Greener Grass, shows a lone female figure standing on top of a boulder, gazing across the vast stretches of sparse landscape ahead. The image is intended to be suggestive of the figure’s aspiration to see beyond the horizon in an attempt to look outside her immediate boundaries.
The artist says:
‘Horizons are all around us, but they are not just the line that separates earth from sky, but literally the border that separates here from there; now from future. As such, the horizon is an absolute limit of both time and space, and since it constantly changes with our movement, the horizon can never be reached or crossed.’
This work was one of a series of public artworks commissioned by The Crown Estate in the Regent Street area. The public artworks, the majority of which have been curated by Modus Operandi, form a key part of their strategy for regeneration of the public realm.