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Joseph Marr (born 1979) is an Australian Artist of English/Maori heritage who lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture, video and photography, his art is conceptually oriented, and generally concerned with issues of consciousness.

Wether its sugar, resin, oil paint or plexiglass glass, the medium for me is a metaphor. The metaphor may be very personal or may be generally accepted meanings. Sugar for example is such a widely used material in the world and thats one thing that I liked about using it as a medium in my work because everyone has a daily experience with it and it makes one feel included if we have already an understanding of the material of an artwork. Oil paint however is something that mainly only artists use and for me is better for expressing personal views of the world.

“Joseph Marr stands in his studio in Berlin Neukölln among all his luminous, graceful sculptures made of coloured sugar mass and quotes from a text by the Hindu master Neem Karola Baba, whose photo hangs on the wall. “I love this person,” he says. Of course, his sculptures have something to do with desire. But the master’s teachings on the art of letting go have become vital to him.

Anyone who has seen Marr’s sculpture “Together”, which is nine meters long, in Berghain, Berlin’s most famous techno club, would not believe at first glance that this work has a spiritual background. Between the sweating revelers and to the deafening sounds, you will find several figures seductively illuminated in the long, glass counter of one of the club bars: male bodies, as it were, merging into each other in hard sex, matching the blissfully libertarian atmosphere of the house. The fact that the sculpture consists of a coloured, semi-transparent glucose cola flavoured mass, so that you could – at least theoretically – also enjoy it orally completes its bold appearance here.

Desire is the creator, desire is the destroyer. To live without desire is to be free.

But it would be a misunderstanding to define Marr’s work only in terms of his undoubtedly spectacular intervention in this one place. He points to the two figures that conclude the series of figures in Berghain and says that this work is also supposed to tell a story about how lust can turn into love and inner letting go. Two bodies rest tightly entwined in dreaming togetherness like an antithesis to the wild goings-on around them. Sculptures made of coloured sugar have occupied the native Australian for much longer and independently of animation occasions. His ability to stage the emotions and desires with his characters as a theatrically symbolic game, skilfully balancing on a sometimes wafer-thin border between high and low, affirmation and exposure, kitsch and appropriation, like Richard Prince or Helmut Newton or Jeff Koons, Marr has developed into an independent artistic strategy.

In his backyard studio in Neukölln, you almost feel like you’re in the workshop of an archaeologist who keeps the antique shards from excavations in boxes and shelves. The mute faces, however, which look at you here in wine-red or candy yellow, having noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. With their frozen charm of surrealistic figurines, they seem so present that they could be materialised dream images. The sight of them alienates and inevitably fascinates. Marr insists that every person who appears here as a sculpture actually exists – starting with an ex-girlfriend who was the model for his first attempt at glucose fusion: “These are not my interpretations,” says Marr, “they are simply ‘they’”: no re-presentations, but presentations of people as they are, only in a different medium. Known, but mostly chance encounters and contacts from the Internet, whom he invites to his studio and photographs with a 3D scanner in a fixed pose, which depending on the situation can be quite a strenuous or intense experience – as in the case of male love scenes Body for the sculpture in Berghain, which Marr describes as an existential experience in the simultaneity of intimacy and staging.

However, the work process that follows the 3D scan essentially corresponds to the processes of industrial production, as with conventional workpieces for design or engineering purposes: After processing the 3D images with a computer program designed for architecture, a company uses the data to create a special milling machine Figure model made of fibre reinforced synthetic wood, on which Marr then takes a mould with silicone. He has this filled with glucose mass in the Katjes sugar factory in Potsdam, which is then made durable with a clear coat after it has hardened. It took him two years to understand the material, says Marr. In the end, only glucose gives the color that golden shimmer that gives his work its gloriously sticky aura.

He originally began painting as an 18 y/o, tutored by his father, himself a notable figurative painter, who always encouraged him. After Joseph ended up in Germany for love, in 2008 he undertook a radical break with his hitherto rather conventional painting style and devoted himself to appropriate techniques. He now took his motifs from the mass media and the Internet and implemented them as collages made of acrylic glass with aluminum inlays or as lightboxes. He quickly had success with this. It was more of a coincidental inspiration that came to him several years ago the idea for the sculptural works – from the ambiguous experience of desire, which has a seductive and insidious, just “difficult” side, as he says.

Which brings us back to the spiritual background: the seductive and at the same time distanced effect of his characters perhaps corresponds to that practiced need for inner letting go, a calmness regained at the end that gives interpersonal experiences the glow of lived dreams”. Carsten Probst