Martin Erik Andersen
Wege, Lauf und Bahn
21 Nov 2025 – 24 Jan 2026
Some paths to follow, things to run with
by Laura Fuglsang
In 1948, Joseph Beuys offered the world a very small bouquet. Three drawings of leaves, each parametrized by a kind of mystical algebra.[i] In these plant studies, pencil lines trace the presence of an underlying geometrical order: the leaf leans toward this structure, and the schema leans back, adjusting itself slightly to the object in a quiet negotiation. Martin Erik Andersen’s search begins here: How did these studies come to be, and why did Beuys make only these three – when leaves so refuse to settle convincingly into line – suddenly allowed themselves to be articulated with such clarity? (If such a thing as a perfectly traced leaf exists, it may be found here.)
Meanwhile, another search unfolded in bookshops around the world: a search for a volume titled Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space. The book appears only for a moment in Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now (1973), held for a single frame before the catastrophe breaks.[ii] For years, he would return to the film in pursuit of the book: first from various cinema seats, waiting for the moment to flicker past; later on DVD, where that instant could finally be paused and the title checked. Piles searched. People asked. Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space was nowhere to be found.
In time, the two pursuits – the tracing of leaves and the fragile geometry of space – once more overlapped, not only meeting in Martin Erik Andersen’s silver carpets, but through the persistent recurrence that time sometimes allows. Beuys’s drawings were, through the simple advantage of clearer digital image searches, traced, most likely, from Samuel Colman’s nineteenth-century studies in geometry and proportions.[iii] That at least settled their origin. And the elusive book turned out to be a prop, a title invented for a single second of cinema.
The title of this show, Wege, Laue und Bahn (ways, runs, paths) lets a quiet choir hum behind the phrase, lifted from the coral Befiehl du deine Wege in a Bach’s St Matthew Passion:
Des, der den Himmel lenkt
Der Wolken, Luft und Winden,
Gibt Wege, Lauf und Bahn,
Der wird auch Wege finden,
Da dein Fuß gehen kann. .[iv]
I was once told that a strange sickness followed the first passenger journeys by rail in the 1820s. People became ill without understanding why, because no one yet thought to link the almost chronic dizziness to the sudden shift in how – and at what speed – the world appeared. The eye was unprepared for flowers, leaves, fields, and roads rushing past in soft dissolution. The gaze tried to keep pace, unaccustomed to that new gliding vision. It wanted to hold each passing thing, and it couldn’t. Perhaps the ache came from that: the effort of grasping what was already leaving.
Another way to trace to a flower: Martin Erik Andersen’s Pneuma, imperial purple. Placed in the back room of the gallery, the aluminium head is cast from the inlet; the bamboo runner, meant only to carry molten metal, has hardened into a stem. The entire bloom – funnel, stem, crown – was never intended as form, only as the apparatus through which the cast came into being (evolving as a root). A flower shaped by the passage that made it, covered in silver leaf, against a wooden board and a sweep of curly purple fur. (He does, after all, offer a rather large bouquet of his own).
Among bamboo, scaffolding, cut-up carpets, and curly purple fur, music floods the room. “Mirth, birth, reverie,” Baby Dee sings after Nico.[v] On her Giulietti Freebass Accordion – the same model Nico played for “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)” – she gives the air its path, the bellows its voice.
Air, like metal, often needs a passage. It gathers, moves, and momentarily cools into forms – a grid, a voice, a petal, a crown.
[i] Joseph Beuys, Lady’s Cloak (1948); Untitled (Leaf in Circle) (1948); Untitled (Leaf Study) (1948). Pencil on paper, each approx. 34 × 25 cm. All in private collections. Reproduced in The Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1974).
[ii] Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicolas Roeg (British Lion Films, 1973).
[iii] Samuel Colman (1832 – 1929) various studies in geometry and proportions of nature, Nature’s Harmonic Unity: A Treatise on its Relation To Proportional form, Ed. by C. Arthur Coan, LL.B. (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912).
[iv] J. S. Bach, Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn, BWV 132 (Weimar, 1715). Text: Salomon Franck.
[v] Baby Dee, “Mirth, Birth, Reverie” in Mirth – Birth – Reverie: Live at Gammel Holtegaard (2025). See also Nico, “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie),” track 7 on The Marble Index (Elektra Records, 1968).