Martin Lang (born 1979, Kent, United Kingdom) makes paintings, photographs, and projections that tackle themes of authenticity, political imagination and post-truth. In these works, an interplay between the truth of the subject’s reality and that imagined by its audience emerges - challenging viewers to construct narratives or uncover truths behind his works.
The series of paintings that comprise “The Truth in Painting 1993” are categorised in several different pages on this site. If you view them in order from top to bottom a narrative emerges. They all employ painting, photography and digital manipulation brought together in pictures that depict events from 1993.
'Each painting in the series contains an amalgamation of “analogue” painterly marks, printed scans of paintings and digital painting. The project anticipates that both the lack of certainty around the mediums used, and the occasions depicted in the works, will spur viewers to question notions of socially constructed and mind-independent truths connected to incidents of that time. Lang frames his work in relation to ideas of slippage of the work of art as a single, unique, entity in Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978) and Enrico Terrone’s concept of “standards of correctness” in The Post-truth in Painting (2019). This positions his work in a “post-truth world”, where the “truth is out there”, but which cannot always be clearly defined and understood.' (Carl Robinson in Painting, Photography, and the Digital: Crossing the Borders of the Mediums Out now -https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8917-9)
Martin Lang lives and works in Lincoln, UK. He is the course leader for MA Fine Art at the University of Lincoln.