Martin Kersels

Martin Kersels is a sculptor and installation artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  Born in the city in 1960, Mr. Kersels received his B.A. and his M.F.A from UCLA.  He began his career as a performance artist collaborating on works with the group SHRIMPS, traveling throughout the United States to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to perform.  Mr. Kersels’s large-scale sculptures and installations are influenced by his performance art, particularly in his explorations of time and movement in his pieces.   He also works with photography, audio, and video media.  Mr. Kersels has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue three separate solo exhibitions of new work in Los Angeles, Paris, and Torino. 

Mr. Kersels has worked on staff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Art Department, and currently serves as a faculty member and co-director of the art program at the California Institute of the Arts.  His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the J. Paul Getty Museum and ACME in Los Angeles, Deitch Projects in New York, and the Galerie Georges-Phillipe and Nathalie Vallois in Paris.  His pieces are in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at La Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris.