Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Standing six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, Martin Kersels is a big guy. "I don't fit in a lot of places, literally and figuratively," he says in an interview published in the catalogue for his first midcareer retrospective, aptly subtitled "Heavyweight Champion." The conspicuousness of his oversize person and the awkwardness of not fitting in are the generative conditions of his practice, as seen in the show's thirty-three works, spanning 1994 to 2007. (Newer works were concurrently on view at ACME gallery.) Kersels employs a range of media, from sculpture and photography to video and performance, and has produced a body of work at once hefty and nimble, slapstick and subtle, confident and...
