Eddie Martinez

Eddie Martinez, When We Were In Good Hands, oil, spray paint, enamel, collaged canvas and silkscreen ink on canvas, 72" x 108", 2016–17.

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. His style combines painting and drawing, abstraction and representation, and a casual approach to materials with an eclectic iconography of figurative elements. 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.

Martinez has exhibited internationally, including solo museum shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Drawing Center, Yuz Museum Shanghai, and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and group exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery in London and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, among others. His work belongs to public institutions including the Bronx Museum, Morgan Library & Museum, Marciano Collection, Saatchi Collection, and Colección Jumex (Mexico City). Martinez is married to artist Sam Moyer, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His family moved frequently, particularly after his parents' marriage ended, and he grew up in California, Florida, Texas and Massachusetts. In 2008, he received a Bauernmarkt Residency from the Lenikus Collection in Vienna.

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. 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. 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. Some paintings combine multiple genres (portraiture, still life, allegorical narrative), while others focus on one, as in Mario Situation (2006), which Art In America's David Coggins wrote "reinvigorates the still life … in a spirit of clear-eyed exploration rather than postmodern posturing." 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). 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.

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.

Martinez attracted institutional recognition in the latter 2010s, with five museum solo shows in three years. 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. 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. 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, Rauschenberg and Johns.

Collections Martinez's work is represented in the permanent collections of institutions including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Marciano Collection, Morgan Library & Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum in the U.S., the Saatchi Collection and Hiscox Collection in London, and the Colección Jumex (Mexico City).

Exhibitions Martinez's early exhibitions included group shows at the Deste Foundation in Athens, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Museum of Mexico City and Saatchi Gallery, and solo shows at ZieherSmith (2006–10) and Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, 2006–8), among others. Previously, he was represented by Blum & Poe (Los Angeles).