What are two leviathan lumberjacks doing in a little white gallery on W. 24th street?  From their expression, neither one seems quite sure.  Somehow, they must have lost their way in the forest, and wondered into a heady and provocative exegesis on the nature of scale

Martin Honert, the man behind the giants, has acquired a prodigious reputation creating works inspired by his own childhood.  A series of small drawings on the wall documents the development of this obsession by representing every major work to date. With this show, Honert offers up the Lilliputian alongside the Brobdingnagian. The wooded landscape of the giants is reproduced in uncanny miniature, in neither painting nor-sculpture, but the uncanny medium of miniature diorama. That’s right, the sort of diorama that 2nd graders make to show the natural environment of terradactyl or pharaohs.  But there’s no cardboard in Honert’s show and tell.  This is hardly a public-school homework production, but rather the sort of project that would require a full time team of tutors specially trained in the installation of video screens and wind blowing machines.  Watch with patience, and the hyper-real wonderland will yield a glossy red surprise…



(*Images, from top to bottom:  Martin Honert, Martin Honert, September 15 - October 27, 2007; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Giants, 2007, mixed media, 124 x 47 1/2 x 68 inches, Copyright Martin Honert, Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.  Martin Honert, Martin Honert, September 15 - October 27, 2007; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; River Landscape, 2006, mixed media, model railway, DVD projection; 41 1/4 x 93 x 57 inches, Copyright Martin Honert, Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.)