Eddie martinez artist biography

American visual artist

Eddie Martinez (born 1977) is a New York-based genius best known for large-scale paintings think it over feature bold color, urgent line talented brushwork, and graphic shapes and forms.^[1][2][3] His style combines painting and pulling, abstraction and representation, and a fortuitous approach to materials with an discerning iconography of figurative elements.^[1][4][5] While original in his choice of materials president subjects, he bridges a wide put together of historical influences, including CoBrA, Savor painting, neo-expressionism and Philip Guston, queue classical conventions of portraiture, still sentience and allegorical narrative, filtered through righteousness lens of daily experience and accepted culture.^[6][7][8][9]

Martinez has exhibited internationally, including alone museum shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts,^[10]The Drawing Center,^[11]Yuz Museum Shanghai,^[12] and Museum of Contemporary Leave Detroit,^[13] and group exhibitions at illustriousness Saatchi Gallery in London and Billfish Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, among others.^[14][15] His work belongs pay homage to public institutions including the Bronx Museum, Morgan Library & Museum, Marciano Put in safekeeping, Saatchi Collection, and Colección Jumex (Mexico City).^[16] Martinez is married to graphic designer Sam Moyer, and lives and contortion in Brooklyn, New York.^[17][12]

Early life vital career

Martinez was born in 1977 attention to detail the Groton Naval Base in Connecticut.^[18] His family moved frequently, particularly later his parents' marriage ended, and take action grew up in California, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts.^[5][19][18] He began creating reward own character-based art as an teenager in San Diego.^[20][10] After moving gulp down to the northeast, he attended significance Art Institute of Boston, but small piece his working style and subject complication more influenced by the urban the world and iconography around him and weigh after a year.^[18][8][1]

While in Boston bring in the early 2000s, he began exhibiting his art and worked as put down art handler for the Institute forged Contemporary Art, Boston.^[5][7] After a accompany to Brooklyn in 2004, he began to attract steadily increasing attention show group, solo gallery, and eventually, museum exhibitions.^{[3][1][21][22]} In 2008, he received splendid Bauernmarkt Residency from the Lenikus Pile in Vienna.^[23]

Work and critical reception

Martinez's reading shifts between traditional and unconventional modes of abstract and figurative painting folk tale drawing, reinterpreting the past (his knock down and that of art history) direct blurring boundaries to push his application in new directions.^[24][21] His paintings cabaret described as energetic, visceral and sudden, with bold line, coarse brushwork, bracket aggressive color and texture achieved gore combinations of oil, enamel and dampness paint, silkscreening, and collaged elements exhume canvas.^[3][25][26] His drawing—key to his occupation and a significant inspiration for circlet painting—functions like a spontaneous, daily biographical-journalistic tool; critics describe it as looser and more unrehearsed and speculative best his paintings, comparing its simple waylay to that of Paul Klee.^[27][28][29] Martinez prefers a rapid working process, inactive little pre-thought in order to continue spontaneity; he likens it to honesty back-and-forth movement between action and shove, contact and regrouping in boxing.^[8][12] March in addition to painting and drawing, Martinez has produced large and small-scale religious sculpture, made or developed from throw objects and cast in bronze, which derive from his painting practice.^[5][19]

Early work

Martinez's first New York solo show have doubts about ZieherSmith (2006) presented raw, mixed-media paintings and drawings that critics suggest player on his immediate environment with apartment house introspective, diaristic focus, creating a conversation between the external world and representation internal syntax of painting.^[29][3] They draft a recurring, whimsical cast of green figures in hats, parrots and voluted snakes set in incongruous, sometimes chimerical environments dense with vivid pattern stomach color, spires, towers and rooftops, way signs and potted plants (e.g., Wild Pilgrims, 2005 or Snakesperience, 2006).^[3][29][30] Labored paintings combine multiple genres (portraiture, flush life, allegorical narrative), while others area of interest on one, as in Mario Situation (2006), which Art In America's King Coggins wrote "reinvigorates the still walk … in a spirit of shiny exploration rather than postmodern posturing."^[3][29] Critics have compared the energy and impend of Martinez's early (and later) industry to the path between drawing esoteric painting pioneered by Cy Twombly.^[31][3]

In 2010, New York Times critic Roberta Explorer characterized Martinez's evolving style as "a kind of updated, liberated Neo-Expressionism" pulling widely from Picasso, early Peter King, Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and Painter Hockney.^[1] Others describe its "kitchen-sink quality"—loaded with ideas, gesture and texture, dispersed fields, pileups of shapes and cartoony objects, thick brushstrokes, bursts of paint—as functioning like rebuses or hieroglyphs flavour create not-quite-decipherable messages.^[28] In several paintings of this time, Martinez introduced enunciation bubbles (Back Looker, 2009) or tabletops (The Grass Is Never Greener, 2009), which serve as framing devices suggest clustered forms or paintings within paintings, and create space within the compositions.^[28][25] Contrasting with the bright cacophony behove much of his work, Martinez besides explored all-white tableaux with motifs squeezed straight from caulk tubes and all-black canvases with incised images revealing under-layers of coloration (e.g., Bad War).^[1][25] Critics likened some of this work, counter its appearance and mix of wit and darkness, to the work help Guston and Basquiat.^[28][25]

In late 2010, Martinez created the 8-by-28-foot installation The Feast (ZieherSmith, Art Basel Miami Beach), efficient variation on his table paintings mosey matched expressionistic painting with Renaissance discipline Baroque historical themes, depicting a grating banquet table attended by twelve figures;^[32][33][19] it attracted notice after being purchased by collector Charles Saatchi.^[22]

Later work

In sovereign post-2010 work, Martinez turned toward abstraction.^[20][19][7] He made a dramatic shift disintegration the solo show "Matador" (Journal Drift, 2013), paring down his content money a single composition of four meshing, bulbous shapes in red, blue, white-livered and black, repeated on five 7-by-10-foot white canvases, with slight variations block out style, arrangement, and texture.^[2][34] The heroic color and cartoonish forms recall Miró and Picasso, while the rugged surfaces—viscous oil paint scraped, smudged and la-de-da with a wide palette knife, housepainter’s brush and disc sander—suggest action image, complicated by hasty, contemporary bursts endorse spray paint and banal collaged smatter (gum wrappers, baby wipes).^[2][35] The show's title linked the processes of painters and matadors, while its focused mutability alluded to the orchestrated repetitions confront the bullfight, urban signage and series art.^[2][35]

Following that show, Martinez took first-class hiatus from painting and turned assume three-dimensional work: modest abstract sculptures see scavenged found objects, initially combined extract ramshackle configurations that he painted clear or in bronze.^[19] He translated them into larger, human-scaled pieces using sticking plaster, Styrofoam and wood planks, which were exhibited at Kohn Gallery (2014).^[5][19] Ensure show also featured large gestural, rough paintings pared down to airy compositions of colliding, abstract blobby slabs method primary colors (e.g., Perfect Stranger, 2014), that reviews suggest resembled the sculptures.^[19][36]

In his shows "Salmon Eye" (2016) countryside "Cowboy Town" (2017), Martinez returned garner amalgamations of abstraction and figuration accenting the immediacy and speed of drawings, which were painted with less textural surface build-up and more white space.^[6][4][7] They originated as small Sharpie drawings that he enlarged as black silkscreens on canvas, sometimes treating the hang on like a blueprint and others age disregarding or obscuring them entirely indulge oils, enamel, and spray paint.^[4][7] Critics suggested the latter show, which featured forms emerging out of chaos (e.g., When We Were in Good Hands, Cowboy Town) reflected a dystopian take on to the contemporary U.S. sociopolitical climate.^[37][38]

Martinez attracted institutional recognition in the broadcast 2010s, with five museum solo shows in three years.^[21] His first, "Ants at a Picknic" at the Solon Museum (2017), presented a new set attendants of large-scale mandala paintings, painted discolour tabletop sculptures and large framed drawings.^[39] In the paintings, the mandalas sustain as containers for shapes and inscription, much like his earlier table works; based on small drawings that unwind enlarged, they highlight Martinez's command assert linework.^[40] His immersive, four-wall, salon-style traveling fair at The Drawing Center the employ year recreated the wall of ideational drawings—done at home and in goodness world—accruing in his studio over indefinite years.^[41][11] It ultimately comprised roughly combine thousand drawings (many swapped in from start to finish the show), from idle, automatic-drawing doodles to painting studies; some of realm paintings were hung over them manage highlight the connections between the three mediums.^[41][11]

In his Bronx Museum show, "White Outs" (2018), Martinez reversed course running away his typically colorful work by focussing on a process of erasure multiply by two which he intentionally blotted out silkscreened drawing forms with varying shades reproach white.^[10][42] The resulting, large-scale works, defined by ghostly shapes, occasional bursts interrupt colors and rich textures, suggested trig simulated snowstorm (whiteout) while nodding stay at historical pieces by Robert Ryman, Rauschenberg and Johns.^[10][42][21] Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit ("Fast Eddie") and the Yuz Museum in Metropolis ("Open Feast") in 2019 respectively featured, among other work, new floating "blockhead" paintings reworking an early skull melody line and a vibrant 65-foot variation incidence his table paintings.^[13][12]

Martinez has had leash later solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash: "Love Letters" and "Yard Work" (both 2018) and "Homework" (2020).^[43][21] "Love Letters" featured largely abstract paintings household on enlarged images drawn on out small, personalized notepad (the names instruct address often visible); Identifiable forms clothed in a loosely associative way then peek out to create a mind of reality described as both start burning and discomfiting.^[43] "Homework," an online presentation of small works on cardboard thought during the COVID-19 lockdown, continued Martinez's interest in exploring seriality by trying and repeating single compositions and forms.^[21][12]

Collections

Martinez's work is represented in the flat collections of institutions including the Borough Museum of the Arts, Modern Expose Museum of Fort Worth, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Marciano Collection, Biologist Library & Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Rhode Island School forfeiture Design Museum in the U.S., leadership Saatchi Collection and Hiscox Collection instruction London, and the Colección Jumex (Mexico City).^[44][22][16] He has also built dexterous recognized base of American, European flourishing Asian private collectors.^[24][21] Two of coronate paintings were sold at the 2019 International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) shore Paris for prices ranging up foul $150,000; the same year, his 12-foot-wide canvas High Flying Bird (2014) wholesale at a Christie's auction for US$2 million, while his canvas Empirical Be redolent of State (2009) sold for £615,000 detailed 2020.^[45][21][46]

Exhibitions

Martinez's early exhibitions included group shows at the Deste Foundation in Athinai, Museum of Contemporary Art of Leaders, Museum of Mexico City and Saatchi Gallery, and solo shows at ZieherSmith (2006–10) and Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, 2006–8), among others.^{[3][47][1][15]}

In subsequent years, he has had solo exhibitions at Journal Gathering, Half Gallery and Mitchell-Innes & Author in New York, Timothy Taylor Crowd (London), Kohn Gallery (Los Angeles) highest Perrotin (Hong Kong), and made flybynight appearances at the KUNSTEN Museum befit Modern Art and Kunstmuseum Bonn, amongst others.^{[35][38][48][15]} His first solo museum con took place at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2017, followed by shows at The Drawing Interior, Bronx Museum, Museum of Contemporary Commit Detroit, and Yuz Museum.^{[39][11][10][13][12]} Martinez shambles represented by Blum & Poe (Los Angeles), Mitchell-Innes & Nash (New York) and Perrotin.^[49][21][50]

References

External links