Eddie Martinez (born 1977) is a New York-based artist best known for large-scale paintings that feature bold color, urgent line and brushwork, and graphic shapes and forms.Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', February 12, 2010. Retrieved July 27, 2020.Howard, Christopher
Eddie Martinez,"
''Artforum'', April 2013. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Coggins, David. "Eddie Martinez at ZieherSmith," ''Art In America'', October 2006. His style combines painting and drawing, abstraction and representation, and a casual approach to materials with an eclectic iconography of figurative elements.''The New Yorker''
"Eddie Martinez,"
February 17, 2016. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Small, Rachel and Barry McGee
"Barry McGee x Eddie Martinez,"
''Interview'', September 12, 2014. Retrieved July 27, 2020. While contemporary in his choice of materials and subjects, he bridges a wide range of historical influences, including CoBrA, Action painting, neo-expressionism and Philip Guston, and classical conventions of portraiture, still life and allegorical narrative, filtered through the lens of daily experience and popular culture.Blair, Courtney Willis
"Studio Visit: Eddie Martinez,"
''Forbes'', March 3, 2016. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Powers, Bill
"'I Needed to Figure Out Something I Could Make Myself': A Talk With Eddie Martinez,"
''ARTnews'', January 25, 2016. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Millar, Amy
Eddie Martinez
''Ocula'', 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020.Miller, Ken (ed.)
''Revisionaries; A Decade of Artists in Tokion''
New York: Abrams, 2007. Retrieved July 27, 2020. Martinez has exhibited internationally, including solo museum shows at the

Bronx Museum of the Arts The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BxMA), also called the Bronx Museum of Art or simply the Bronx Museum, is an American cultural institution located in Concourse, Bronx, New York. The museum focuses on contemporary and 20th-century works created by A ...

,Schwendener, Martha
"What To See In New York Art Galleries This Week,"
''The New York Times'', January 8, 2019. Retrieved July 27, 2020.

The Drawing Center The Drawing Center is a Manhattan, New York, museum and a nonprofit exhibition space that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. History The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of drawings at ...

,Scott, Andrea K
"Four Drawing Shows To See Now,"
''The New Yorker'', October 25, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020.

Yuz Museum Shanghai The Yuz Museum Shanghai (Chinese: 余德耀美术馆) is a non-profit organization under the umbrella of the Yuz Foundation. It is located in the West Bund in Xuhui District, Shanghai. Yuz is reconstructed from the hangar of the original Longhua A ...

,Pricco, Evan
"Eddie Martinez: Fast Serve,"
''Juxtapoz'', March 2020. Retrieved July 27, 2020. and

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in Detroit. MOCAD is housed in a building, a converted former auto dealership designed by architect Andrew Zago. The architecture of the building ...

,Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
"Eddie Martinez: Fast Eddie,"
Exhibitions. Retrieved September 29, 2020. and group exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery in London and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, among others.Saatchi Gallery
Eddie Martinez
Artists. Retrieved July 27, 2020.CASS Sculpture Foundation
Eddie Martinez
Artists. Retrieved September 29, 2020. His work belongs to public institutions including the Bronx Museum,

Morgan Library & Museum The Morgan Library & Museum, formerly the Pierpont Morgan Library, is a museum and research library in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is situated at 225 Madison Avenue, between 36th Street to the south and 37th S ...

, Marciano Collection,

Saatchi Collection The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Da ...

, and Colección Jumex (Mexico City).Phillips
"Energy & Dynamism: Eddie Martinez."
Retrieved September 29, 2020. Martinez is married to artist

Sam Moyer Sam Moyer (born 1983, Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been positioned alongside that of artists Mika Tajima, R. H. Quaytman, Cheyney Thompson, and Helen Frankenthaler. Life and w ...

, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.Herriman, Kat
"How Five New York Artist Couples Share Space,"
''The New York Times'', February 11, 2016. Retrieved July 27, 2020.

Early life and career

Martinez was born in 1977 on the Groton Naval Base in Connecticut.Robinson, Paul Carter
"Eddie Martinez Speaks To Artlyst About His Latest London Exhibition,"
''Artlyst'', March 30, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020. His family moved frequently, particularly after his parents' marriage ended, and he grew up in California, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts.Indrisek, Scott. "Eddie Martinez Edges Towards Abstraction," ''Artinfo'', September 19, 2014. He began creating his own character-based art as an adolescent in San Diego.Ravich, Nick
"Graffiti taught Eddie Martinez the values of painting fast,"
Art21, 2012. Retrieved July 27, 2020. After moving back to the northeast, he attended the

Art Institute of Boston Lesley University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. As of 2018-19 Lesley University enrolled 6,593 students (2,707 undergraduate and 3,886 graduate). History ...

, but found his working style and subject matter more influenced by the urban culture and iconography around him and left after a year. While in Boston in the early 2000s, he began exhibiting his art and worked as an art handler for the

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...

. After a move to Brooklyn in 2004, he began to attract steadily increasing attention through group, solo gallery, and eventually, museum exhibitions.Sutton, Benjamin
"Why Painter Eddie Martinez Is Having His Biggest Year Yet,"
''Artsy'', August 6, 2020. Retrieved July 27, 2020.Garza Evan J
"Go Big Or Go Home: New American Paintings Spotlight, Eddie Martinez,"
''Huffpost'', March 25, 2011. Retrieved September 29, 2020. In 2008, he received a Bauernmarkt Residency from the Lenikus Collection in Vienna.Lenikus Collection

Retrieved July 27, 2020.

Work and critical reception

Martinez's work shifts between traditional and unconventional modes of abstract and figurative painting and drawing, reinterpreting the past (his own and that of art history) and blurring boundaries to push his practice in new directions.Valdés, Constanza Ontiveros
"Three rising stars that are reinventing painting: Figgis, Martinez, and Kaphar,"
''Art Collection'', September 25, 2020. Retrieved July 27, 2020. His paintings are described as energetic, visceral and immediate, with bold line, coarse brushwork, and aggressive color and texture achieved through combinations of oil, enamel and spray paint, silkscreening, and collaged elements on canvas.Fowlkes, Stephan

''The New York Optimist'', January 2010. Retrieved September 29, 2020.O’Brien, Glenn. ''Eddie Martinez: Studio Drawings'', Paper Chase Press, 2012. Retrieved July 27, 2020. His drawing—key to his work and a significant inspiration for his painting—functions like a spontaneous, daily biographical-journalistic tool; critics describe it as looser and more unrehearsed and speculative than his paintings, comparing its simple style to that of Paul Klee.Coggins, David
"Eddie Martinez,"
''Interview'', November 29, 2008. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Barliant, Claire. "Art Review: Eddie Martinez," ''Time Out'' (New York), February 4–10, 2010.Downey, Anthony. "Debut: Eddie Martinez," ''ArtReview'', June 2006. Martinez prefers a rapid working process, with little pre-thought in order to maintain spontaneity; he likens it to the back-and-forth movement between action and pause, contact and regrouping in boxing. In addition to painting and drawing, Martinez has produced large and small-scale abstract sculpture, made or developed from found objects and cast in bronze, which derive from his painting practice.

Early work

Martinez's first New York solo show at ZieherSmith (2006) presented raw, mixed-media paintings and drawings that critics suggest drew on his immediate environment with an introspective, diaristic focus, creating a dialogue between the external world and the internal syntax of painting. They portray a recurring, whimsical cast of wide-eyed figures in hats, parrots and coiled snakes set in incongruous, sometimes fantastical environments dense with vivid pattern and color, spires, towers and rooftops, road signs and potted plants (e.g., ''Wild Pilgrims'', 2005 or ''Snakesperience'', 2006).Goodrich, John
"Full-Tilt Figuration,"
''The New York Sun'', September 13, 2007. Retrieved September 29, 2020. Some paintings combine multiple genres (portraiture, still life, allegorical narrative), while others focus on one, as in ''Mario Situation'' (2006), which ''Art In Americas David Coggins wrote "reinvigorates the still life … in a spirit of clear-eyed exploration rather than postmodern posturing." Critics have compared the energy and approach of Martinez's early (and later) work to the path between drawing and painting pioneered by Cy Twombly.McQuaid, Cate
"At The Rose and Davis Museums, In Between Representation and Abstraction,"
''The Boston Globe'', October 27, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020. In 2010, ''New York Times'' critic Roberta Smith characterized Martinez's evolving style as "a kind of updated, liberated Neo-Expressionism" drawing widely from

Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

, early

Peter Saul Peter Saul (born August 16, 1934) is an American painter. His work has connections with Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His early use of pop culture cartoon references in the late 1950s and very early 1960s situates him as one of the fa ...

, Arshile Gorky, de Kooning and David Hockney. Others describe its "kitchen-sink quality"—loaded with ideas, gesture and texture, scattered fields, pileups of shapes and cartoony objects, thick brushstrokes, bursts of paint—as functioning like rebuses or hieroglyphs to create not-quite-decipherable messages. In several paintings of this time, Martinez introduced speech bubbles (''Back Looker'', 2009) or tabletops (''The Grass Is Never Greener'', 2009), which serve as framing devices for clustered forms or paintings within paintings, and create space within the compositions. Contrasting with the bright cacophony of much of his work, Martinez also 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''). Critics likened some of this work, in its appearance and mix of humor and darkness, to the work of Guston and

Basquiat Jean-Michel Basquiat (; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al ...

. In late 2010, Martinez created the 8-by-28-foot installation ''The Feast'' (ZieherSmith, Art Basel Miami Beach), a variation on his table paintings that matched expressionistic painting with Renaissance and Baroque historical themes, depicting a raucous banquet table attended by twelve figures;Hurst, Howard
"Art Basel Miami Beach Day 3,"
''ArtCards Review'', December 5, 2010. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Laster, Paul. "The Best of Art Basel Miami Beach 2010," ''Flavorwire'', December 2, 2010. it attracted notice after being purchased by collector

Charles Saatchi Charles Saatchi (; ar, تشارلز ساعتجي; born 9 June 1943) is an Iraqi-British businessman and the co-founder, with his brother Maurice, of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business – the world's largest a ...

Later work

In his post-2010 work, Martinez turned toward abstraction. He made a dramatic shift in the solo show "Matador" (Journal Gallery, 2013), paring down his content to a single composition of four interlocking, bulbous shapes in red, blue, yellow and black, repeated on five 7-by-10-foot white canvases, with slight variations in style, arrangement, and texture.Andrew Russeth
"Eddie Martinez: 'Matador' at the Journal Gallery,"
''The Observer'', April 16, 2013. Retrieved September 29, 2020. The bold color and cartoonish forms recall Miró and Picasso, while the rugged surfaces—viscous oil paint scraped, smudged and attacked with a wide palette knife, housepainter’s brush and disc sander—suggest action painting, complicated by hasty, contemporary bursts of spray paint and banal collaged elements (gum wrappers, baby wipes).Newall, George. "Eddie Martinez," ''Apollo Magazine'', April 11, 2013, The show's title linked the processes of painters and matadors, while its focused variations alluded to the orchestrated repetitions of the bullfight, urban signage and serial art. Following that show, Martinez took a hiatus from painting and turned to three-dimensional work: modest abstract sculptures of scavenged found objects, initially combined in ramshackle configurations that he painted brightly or in bronze. He translated them into larger, human-scaled pieces using plaster, Styrofoam and wood planks, which were exhibited at Kohn Gallery (2014). That show also featured large gestural, sketchy paintings pared down to airy compositions of colliding, abstract blobby slabs of primary colors (e.g., ''Perfect Stranger'', 2014), that reviews suggest resembled the sculptures.Miranda, Carolina A. "Datebook: Painting, performance and film as art season gets into gear," ''Los Angeles Times'', September 12, 2014.. In his shows "Salmon Eye" (2016) and "Cowboy Town" (2017), Martinez returned with amalgamations of abstraction and figuration emphasizing the immediacy and speed of drawings, which were painted with less textural surface build-up and more white space. They originated as small Sharpie drawings that he enlarged as black silkscreens on canvas, sometimes treating the lines like a blueprint and others times disregarding or obscuring them entirely with oils, enamel, and spray paint. 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 response to the contemporary U.S. sociopolitical climate.Nazif, Perwana
"Gallery Hopping: Eddie Martinez Plays Cowboys and Politics at Timothy Taylor,"
''Artnet'', April 3, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Turner, Jethro
"An Interview with Artist Eddie Martinez on his Latest Show 'Cowboy Town' at Timothy Taylor, London,"
Purple Diary'', April 7, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020. Martinez attracted institutional recognition in the latter 2010s, with five museum solo shows in three years. His first, "Ants at a Picknic" at the Davis Museum (2017), presented a new series of large-scale mandala paintings, painted bronze tabletop sculptures and large framed drawings.West, Nancy Shohet
"'Ants at a Picknic' on display at Davis Museum,"
''The Boston Globe'', September 22, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020. In the paintings, the mandalas serve as containers for shapes and marks, much like his earlier table works; based on small drawings that he enlarged, they highlight Martinez's command of linework.Binlot, An
"Eddie Martinez Opens His First Museum Show At The Davis Museum,"
''Forbes'', October 27, 2017. Retrieved July 27, 2020. His immersive, four-wall, salon-style exhibition at The Drawing Center the same year recreated the wall of abstract drawings—done at home and in the world—accruing in his studio over several years.Cascone, Sarah
"Editors' Picks: 18 Things To See In New York This Week,"
''Artnet'', October 10, 2017. Retrieved September 29, 2020. It ultimately comprised roughly two thousand drawings (many swapped in throughout the show), from idle, automatic-drawing doodles to painting studies; some of his paintings were hung over them to highlight the connections between the two mediums. In his Bronx Museum show, "White Outs" (2018), Martinez reversed course from his typically colorful work by focusing on a process of erasure in which he intentionally blotted out silkscreened drawing forms with varying shades of white.Cascone, Sarah. and Caroline Goldstein. "35 Stunning Museum Shows To See in New York Over The Holidays, From Renaissance Jewel Boxes to Heart-Thumping Surveys,"] ''Artnet'', December 11, 2018. The resulting, large-scale works, characterized by ghostly shapes, occasional bursts of colors and rich textures, suggested a simulated snowstorm (whiteout) while nodding to historical pieces by

Robert Ryman Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930February 8, 2019) was an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. He was best known for abstract, white-on-white paintings. He lived and worked in New York C ...

, Rauschenberg and Johns. Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit ("Fast Eddie") and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai ("Open Feast") in 2019 respectively featured, among other work, new floating "blockhead" paintings reworking an early skull motif and a vibrant 65-foot variation on his table paintings. Martinez has had three later solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash: "Love Letters" and "Yard Work" (both 2018) and "Homework" (2020).Stevenson, Jonathan
"Eddie Martinez: Hard-earned cool,"
''Two Coats of Paint'', February 2, 2018. Retrieved July 27, 2020. "Love Letters" featured largely abstract paintings based on enlarged images drawn on a small, personalized notepad (the names and address often visible); Identifiable forms arrayed in a loosely associative way occasionally peek out to create a sense of reality described as both playful and discomfiting. "Homework," an online exhibition of small works on cardboard made during the COVID-19 lockdown, continued Martinez's interest in exploring seriality by testing and repeating single compositions and forms.

Collections

Martinez's work is represented in the permanent collections of institutions including the

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (widely referred to as The Modern) is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the c ...

Davis Museum at Wellesley College The Davis Museum in Wellesley, Massachusetts is located on the Wellesley College campus. The college art collection was first displayed in the Farnsworth Art Building, founded in 1889. The museum in its present form opened in 1993 in a building ...

, Marciano Collection,

and

Rhode Island School of Design Museum The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877, and still shares multiple build ...

in the U.S., the

and Hiscox Collection in London, and the Colección Jumex (Mexico City).The Morgan Library & Museum
Eddie Martinez
Drawings. Retrieved September 29, 2020. He has also built a recognized base of American, European and Asian private collectors. Two of his paintings were sold at the 2019 International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris for prices ranging up to $150,000; the same year, his 12-foot-wide canvas ''High Flying Bird'' (2014) sold at a

Christie's Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, at Rockefeller Center in New York City and at Alexandra House in Hong Kong. It is ...

auction for US$2 million, while his canvas ''Empirical Mind State'' (2009) sold for £615,000 in 2020.Loos, Te
"In a Busy Month for Art Fairs, FIAC Counts Collectors Among Its Treasures,"
''The New York Times'', October 17, 2018. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Rayburn, Scott

''The New York Times'', February 12, 2020. Retrieved September 29, 2020.

Exhibitions

Martinez's early exhibitions included group shows at the

Deste Foundation Deste Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art is an arts foundation in Nea Ionia, a northern suburb of Athens, Greece. Housing the art collection of Greek businessman Dakis Joannou, it organizes exhibitions with the collection and commissions new w ...

in Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome,

Museum of Mexico City The Museum of Mexico City (Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico) is located at Pino Suarez 30, a few blocks south of the Zocalo, on what was the Iztapalapa Causeway, near where Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma II met for the first time. This building used t ...

and Saatchi Gallery, and solo shows at ZieherSmith (2006–10) and Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, 2006–8), among others.Slöör, Susanna. "Att markera sin plats: Eddie Martinez, Galleri Loyal," ''Omkonst'', February 16, 2006. In subsequent years, he has had solo exhibitions at Journal Gallery, Half Gallery and Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, Timothy Taylor Gallery (London), Kohn Gallery (Los Angeles) and Perrotin (Hong Kong), and made group appearances at the KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art and

Kunstmuseum Bonn The Kunstmuseum Bonn or Bonn Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Bonn, Germany, founded in 1947. The Kunstmuseum exhibits both temporary exhibitions and its collection. Its collection is focused on Rhenish Expressionism and post-war German ...

, among others.Waltemath, Joan
"Means of Approach: New York Painting,"
''Brooklyn Rail'', September 8, 2015. Retrieved July 27, 2020. His first solo museum show took place at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2017, followed by shows at The Drawing Center, Bronx Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Yuz Museum. Martinez is represented by Blum & Poe (Los Angeles), Mitchell-Innes & Nash (New York) and Perrotin.Blum and Poe
Eddie Martinez
Artists. Retrieved September 29, 2020.Perrotin
Eddie Martinez
Artists. Retrieved September 29, 2020.