Arts & Culture

Galleries and Museum Exhibitions

Perrotin Hong Kong: Eddie Martinez solo exhibition "EMHK19" opening on May 17

Perrotin Hong Kong is pleased to present Eddie Martinez’s second solo exhibition with the gallery following “Blockhead Stacks” in Tokyo in 2018.

Born in Connecticut in 1977, Eddie Martinez is a Brooklyn-based artist whose poignant approach to painting combines figuration with abstraction, using deft, gestural strokes and various combinations of media–oil, enamel, spray paint, leaves, thumbtacks, baby wipes–to introduce texture imparting his candid and uninhibited creative process.

Unlike many artists for whom drawing is a preliminary act, Martinez sees drawing as the creative exercise pervading his oeuvre as well as an essential tool with which he navigates life. Many of Martinez’s drawings are done outside his workspace, testaments to his incessant drawing habit regardless of time or location—on trains, at restaurants and meetings, inside waiting rooms.

In many of his paintings, Martinez enlarges and silkscreens his drawings onto canvas, bringing in further layers of life using an inimitable palette of colors. With his idiosyncratic visual language of floating heads and bug-eyed characters, Martinez demonstrates virtuosic manipulation of the line. Swerving contours and sharp strokes embody the movement of the artist, recalling Harold Rosenberg’s description of the canvas as “an arena in which to act”. [1] With speed and freedom of gesture, Martinez relates on his canvases a moment of encounter that gets at the heart of mark making— the mark of a child, according to the artist—and all its extensive possibilities. Martinez’s sculptures translate his exploration of line, composition, and color into three dimensions. Cast in bronze and coated in color, the sculptures are made from prosaic found objects gathered to form unified wholes, finding reference in assemblage and the readymade as they denote Martinez’s playful study of physical matter and material culture.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is currently also holding a solo exhibition of the artist, on view until August 18, 2019. Martinez has had recent solo exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and The Drawing Center in New York as well as the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, US.

He has exhibited in group shows such as “New York Painting,” Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); “Body Language,” The Saatchi Gallery, London (2013–2014); “New York Minute,” Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011); “Mail Orders and Monsters,” Deitch Projects, New York (2007); and “Panic Room: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection,” Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens (2006).

His works are notably included in The Saatchi Collection, London; Hiscox Collection, London; La Colección Júmex, Mexico City; The Marciano Collection, Los Angeles; The Morgan Library, New York; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, US.