Martin Thompson (New Zealand artist)

Martin Thompson (born Wellington, January 1956[1][2]) is a New Zealand artist.

A self-taught artist, Thompson has gained fame in the world of outsider art for his grid-like drawings, created from plane fractals. A mathematical savant, Thompson calculates the formula needed for each artwork, creating images in which repeated patterns overlay at decreasing sizes and scales, much in the way of a Sierpinski carpet.

Describing himself as "an old hippie", and with self-diagnosed Asperger syndrome[1], Thompson lives reclusively; his gifts in mathematics are balanced by difficulty to operate easily within social settings[3]. He spends much of his time obsessively working on his art, in a seeming attempt to create order from the chaos of the universe. Rather than working in a studio, much of his work is created while sitting at the tables of local cafés,[4] originally in his native Wellington, but more recently in the city of Dunedin, where Thompson moved in 2007.[1]

Thompson began his drawing career in 1980[5]. Originally created using commercial A3 and A4 graph paper, hand-coloured in fine art pens, he has now expanded to include much larger works and - since about 2016, coloured papers. Thompson is extremely particular about the pens which he uses and the colours which they produce[4]. Thompson's technique not only includes the hand-marking of grids, but the deliberate physical cutting and pasting of areas of grid from one part of his works to another. Each finished work is created in two halves, a "positive" and a "negative" image of the mathematical formula which Thompson has used, and as such all of his works have a two-by-one ratio in size[4].

In 2002, Thompson met with curator Brooke Anderson, who featured his work in a 2005 exhibition, "Obsessive Drawings", at the American Folk Art Museum in New York[6]. This led to Thompson's work becoming known outside New Zealand for the first time, and he has since built up a small but significant international following. Within New Zealand, Thompson has had numerous shows at City Gallery Wellington and Brett McDowell Gallery (Dunedin), and in 2015 he was the subject of a one-man show, "Sublime Worlds", at Dunedin Public Art Gallery[7]. Outside New Zealand, Thompson's art has been shown at New York's Ricco Maresca Gallery.