Martin Basher’s painting and sculptural work draws from a broad range of sources, playing with the lineages of landscape painting, hard edged abstraction, Bahaus graphic design, environmentalist, utopian and tourism imagery, advertising, retail design, and display-based artistic practices. From his trademark paintings of abstract gradated stripes and photo-real, screen-saver beaches, to sculptural installations serving as displays for consumer goods, Basher activates spaces of sublimated desires, at once familiar and strange, inviting and severe. In these complex displays, Basher invokes unspoken drives, the mundane and exclusive, the highbrow and lowbrow, and the public and private impulses that inform us as consuming, desiring, aspiring and wanting individuals. Since Covid, Basher's work has also come to consider how nature, in this time of the anthropocene, might factor into the practice. Highly stylized, Ikebana-esque floral arrangements populated with genetically modified insects introduce an additional element into the work; a flora and fauna at once artificial and aspirational,

Martin Basher (b. 1979, Wellington, New Zealand) holds a BA (2003) and MFA (2008) from Columbia University in New York and a Doctorate in Fine Art (2018) from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Basher’s work has been shown globally. Public institutional exhibitions include the University of Connecticut; Art In General, New York, Exit Art New York; The Auckland Art Gallery; City Gallery Wellington, and The Whangarei Art Museum. His outdoor work has been exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, The Public Art Fund, New York, The Rockefeller Apartments, New York, Sculpture on the Gulf, Waiheke Island, and most recently on the Colin Post Four Plinths, on the Wellington Waterfront next to Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand. Basher lives and works between New York City and Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.