Martyn McKenzie, ‘Targanice’

Artist Bio

Martyn McKenzie is an artist and musician based in Glasgow, Scotland. He cites his experience of growing up in Inverclyde as the foundation of his artistic perspective, where the remnants of industry coexist with the raw natural landscape. After studying Painting at Edinburgh College of Art from 2008–2012, McKenzie moved to Nice, France to develop his practice, working primarily in watercolour, before returning to Edinburgh to produce his first solo show at the Sutton Gallery in 2016. He was a selected finalist for the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in 2015 and was long-listed for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2023.

Selected exhibitions include: In-Between Days (two-person show with Kate McAllan), Southside Studios, Glasgow, October 2023; two-person show with Jacob Little John, Detail X Rafiki Gallery, Edinburgh, September 2022; Low Lands (solo), Sutton Gallery, Edinburgh, August 2018; Outside Inside (group), Tatha Gallery, Newport-on-Tay, July 2021; Coast (group), An Talla Solais, Ullapool, June 2019; Between the Real and the Imagined (solo), McLean Museum, Greenock, November 2016.

McKenzie is currently developing a significant body of work, continuing to experiment with the scale of his oil paintings for various exhibition contexts, alongside working with monoprints and introducing aspects of film and drawing into his practice. He is the singer of Glasgow-based band Luthia, currently recording their debut album.

Artist Statement

My work develops from chance moments in life—scenes that capture my attention and appear to contain a meaning, whether political or elemental. The paintings represent places or experiences and are intended to be seen in conversation with one another, creating a poetic narrative. In this sense, they act as a collective memoir: images that exist between the personal and the universal, forming a constant investigation.

I am interested in the landscape as a political space—places that we inhabit or use, or that hold sociological and/or historical significance. Power stations, high-rise flats, dams, wind turbines, the streetlights of a distant town, and the reflections of artificial light in a river all point to the uncanniness of human presence embedded in the environments we live in or pass through. I am also drawn to certain interior spaces that provoke stillness or a sense of how we choose to live. It is important to me that these images of human spaces are juxtaposed with evocations of the landscape in its purest form—the natural elements of water, air, light, and earth, and the totality of our expectation of beauty.