The Dealers: Marta Makes Magic

Photo: Claire Preston

The Silver Lake-based gallery Marta is an experimental cauldron that stirs vast visual cultures and mediums together. In 2019, the gallery sprang from co-founders and curators Benjamin Critton (whose background is in publications and typography) and Heidi Korsavong (production and interiors). The nature of its inception is paramount to understanding its influence; as a host of multi-disciplinary makers and their objects, Marta serves as a refined playground where art and design meet, fostering an expansive space where creatives can explore relationships between the two. The collaborative vision that Critton and Korsavong share has the power to create magic. The two ritually frequent the Los Angeles Flower Market downtown to adorn their space with seasonal shapes and infuse it with fragrances. Roused by the market’s endemic metal plant stands and wooden bleachers on wheels, Critton and Korsavong observe structural inspiration everywhere. Serving as both a marketplace and communal space, Marta has assembled 51 exhibitions of various scales under its roof.

With a commitment to physical space and accessibility, Marta outgrew its humble origins in an Echo Park studio to its current location, a former truck garage, which is large enough to allow for an artist loft on site. Each show is the result of multiple minds traveling together on a thematic sojourn; through scrupulous research and careful curiosity, Critton and Korsavong revere history while also encouraging contemporary context to mold output. The dealers’ choice to generally work with one artist at a time reveals a foundational value of deep understanding and narrative focus. With a passion for blending artistic influences and breaking down barriers between disciplines, Marta balances the utilitarian with the conceptual.

What kind of dealer are you?

Benjamin Critton: Tentative; loath; cautious.

In your opinion, what responsibilities do galleries have beyond sales?

Heidi Korsavong: Provide support to the practice, and interpretation and context to the work.

Why do you deal?

HK: To have a close relationship with artists and an intimacy with their work. I’m optimistic about a world in which art is central.

BC: Because I love all the other structures that surround the act itself. Dealing, for me, is more like a tolerable, fascinating, and sometimes-diverting byproduct of all the other excellent things it necessitates.

How do you think the gallery model will evolve?

HK: More collaborations and intersections with other industries and disciplines.

BC: Galleries will likely get more niche and idiosyncratic, and will probably be better for it.

What is your relationship to risk?

HK: Risk is necessary for forward movement.

BC: We bathe in it daily but are not inherently fond of it.

Best advice you have received?

HK: Stay nimble.

BC: In graduate school, the artist and designer Paul Elliman visited for a workshop; I don’t remember the brief or theme. At some point, I was really in it—deep in the toil, getting existential. And Paul was sitting at my desk-studio with me, and after a long pause in the conversation, he said to me empathetically: “Ben—it’s just fucking graphics.” And since then, in my internal monologue, I have taken the liberty of replacing the term ‘graphics’ with anything of need.

What advice do you have for artists on gallery etiquette?

HK: Communicate honestly and respectfully.

BC: Be really gentle and maybe really subtle with a pitch. If geography is on your side, save that pitch until a third or fourth visit to the gallery.

Photo: Claire Preston

Which artists dead or alive would you start collecting, given money was no constraint?

HK: Etel Adnan, On Kawara, Shiro Kuramata, and Eva Hesse.

BC: A baker’s dozen: Etel Adnan, Richard Artschwager, Daniel Buren, Jeremy Frey, Hasui Kawase, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Giorgio Morandi, Magdalene Odundo, Fairfield Porter, Edward Ruscha, Arlene Shechet, Franz Erhard Walther.

What makes a piece of art ‘important’?

HK: Continuity and contribution.

Who are some of your favorite players in the field and why?

HK: Paula Cooper. Her holistic approach and respect for artists.

BC: Here in Los Angeles, we really admire Nonaka-Hill (Rodney & Taka) and Karma (Brendan Dugan). Brendan gave me one of my first jobs. It had nothing to do with gallery operations. It was in 2009 and Karma [the gallery] was very nascent; Brendan and Siniša [Mačković] ran a design practice called An Art Service from the back of Karma [the bookstore], and I helped design a new graphic identity for Dakis Joannou’s DESTE Foundation.

Any rules you live by?

HK: Make it nice.

BC: Make it nice.

What do you value most in working with an artist?

HK: Different viewpoints, constant reminder of what it means to be human.

BC: Esprit de corps.

Photo: Claire Preston

How does your approach in selling objects differ from selling fine art?

BC: It honestly doesn’t. I think more so than other dealers, however, we are nearly always thinking about sitting, about how a work can or will live in domestic or institutional space.

Favorite institution?

HK: Dia Beacon.

BC: In Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the U.S.: Dia Beacon. In the world: Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Any studio visit red flags?

HK: Entitlement and impatience, though it’s more about the chemistry.

BC: Showing only full-cooked work. We really like—maybe need—to see works in progress, experiments, notions, things half-cooked alongside fully-realised works.

How do you measure long-term success for an artist you represent?

HK: They are able to provide a decent life for themselves and their families on their terms; physical and mental space to create as often as they like; ability to participate in a sustained and meaningful dialogue alongside their peers and contemporaries.

Do you think art fairs are helping or hurting the gallery model?

BC: Net hurting, but their spirit is meaningful and salvageable.

Is there a book, film, or person that has shaped how you work?

HK: In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

BC: Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects; Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology, Bern Porter’s Found Poems.

What architectural building encapsulates your style?

HK: Utsav House by Studio Mumbai.

BC: Jim and Helen Ede’s Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, England.

Do you believe in art world karma?

HK: I believe in integrity.

BC: Yes. And emphatically.

Photo: Claire Preston

Based in Los Angeles, Claire’s experience includes creative production (event/photo), film photography, and artist marketing/management. She is skilled in understanding a vision, building on ideas and wrangling humans for execution.

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