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Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work has elicited comparisons outside the visual arts to the writings of Paul Celan and José Saramago and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since his first show in 1995, his paintings, photographs and sculptures have been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Latin America, including a traveling 10-year survey of his work in 2001 organized by The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu. This will be our first exhibition with Martínez Celaya and will focus on the artist’s works on paper. Humble in means – painted in ethereal washes of watercolors and inks and informally composed of fragmented and stylized forms – the phenomenological and spiritual themes of Martínez Celaya’s work emerge slowly. Sometimes specific, at other times mythic, Martínez Celaya’s human and animal forms are deployed in fictional, undefined landscapes. His quiet and contemplative compositions are executed on found materials like the cardboard in Soundness (below right) or on distressed papers as in Raven-Boy (below left), and often incorporate elements of collage and painted using the unusual material of emulsified tar.
BIOGRAPHY
Enrique Martínez Celaya was born in Palos, Cuba on June 9, 1964. He began his art training as apprentice to an academic painter at the age of eleven. In addition to painting, he published poetry, built a laser, and received prizes from the Department of Energy and the National Congress of Science. While attending Cornell University he chose to pursue his work in art independently, an approach he continued during his graduate studies in Quantum Electronics at the University of California, Berkeley where he was supported by a fellowship from the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
In 1994, five years after abandoning the Ph.D. program at Berkeley, he concluded his M.F.A., at the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving the “Art Affiliates Award” and a department fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. In 1998 Martínez Celaya received Los Angeles County Museum of Art's “Art Here and Now Award.” His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Martínez Celaya has published and edited several books and essays of fiction, poetry, science and philosophy. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
His work has been discussed in ARTFORUM, ARTnews, Art Issues, Art Papers, Artweek and there was an extensive 6-page article by Leah Ollman for Art in America.
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