Micro-nation enthusiasts, unite! Because if there has to be such a thing as countries, then they should be as tiny as possible. Though there’s nothing diminutive about the paintings and sculptures of American artist Eddie Martinez, who was chosen to represent this cute little Italy-enclosed splotch. Martinez’s own splotches, loaded with chromatic charisma and interlaid with dashing and rhythmical linework, are verdant, fruitful, and sexy as hell. My favorite of the paintings is Olive Garden, 2024, which I’m fairly certain is not a reference to the restaurant.

To “read“ Eddie Martinez’s new show Wavelengths demands that we activate our propensity for a scattered, frenetic attention. In his paintings, Martinez, as ever, sends us spiraling through all possible associations, from nature to toys to politics, from still life to continual-motion life, to jazz and to sports. Obliterating and then activating colors and subjects by whiting them out in his series known as “Whiteouts,” and letting the undertext show through allows us to sense the presence of words, though we can’t decipher them. His painting is a form of poetry in motion, always activating abstraction, digging into its roots, showing where the sound of color and form convene. It’s synesthesia. Obviously, Martinez wants to say and show everything on his mind and in his eye at once. Motion is implied in the title Wavelengths, allowing for a back and forthing, physically and mentally, which leads to a kind of ebullient incoherence. The large painting Emartllc No.5 (Recent Growth) (2023) takes us from a “bufly,” (named after his young son’s mispronunciation of butterfly) on the left of the canvas to a flurry of activity exploding on the right, suggesting an uncontrolled migration of shapes as though the bufly were narrating his/her story.

Born in 1977 and based in Brooklyn, New York, Eddie Martinez is known for his vibrant, gestural, often large-scale works that incorporate recurring motifs such as bugs, ducks, and skulls. His approach incorporates various materials and techniques, from oil and enamel to collage and found objects, engaging with art historical references in innovative ways. In recent years, Martinez has presented several solo museum exhibitions, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. His works are held in prestigious public collections worldwide, such as the Morgan Library in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Saatchi Collection in London. Martinez has been selected to represent the Republic of San Marino at the upcoming Venice Biennale in an exhibition titled “Nomader.” Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the pavilion will showcase Martinez’s latest work across various mediums, including painting, sculpture, and drawing. The exhibition runs from April 20th to November 24th at the Pavilion of the Republic of San Marino, organized by FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea S.p.a.

Martinez is best known for his expressive paintings made of aggressive color fields and subtle bug-eyed characters, which he intuitively creates in an attempt to blur the lines of representation. Born in Connecticut and based in Brooklyn, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including an ongoing group show currently at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. Entitled Nomader, the forthcoming exhibition will be curated by Alison M. Gingeras, in collaboration with the FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea and Paolo Rondelli. Having first worked together back in a 2015 show at BLUM (formerly Blum & Poe), Gingeras believes that Martinez’ automatic way of drawing reflects the mental maps of the mind. In an interview with ARTnews, she explained that “Eddie allows himself, almost forces himself to constantly migrate through different modes of making and different visual languages—whether it be abstraction or figuration, or some sort of hybrid—and that really is legible in the drawings.” The 2024 Venice Biennale will commence from April 20 to November 24, 2024 and will also include the first time an Indigenous artist will represent both the US and Brazilian pavilions.

American artist Eddie Martinez will represent San Marino, a tiny landlocked nation inside Italy, at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The country has historically invited artists of varying nationalities to represent it at the Biennale, in honor of its heritage as a place of refuge for foreign nationals. Martinez, who is known largely as a painter, will exhibit paintings, drawings, and sculpture. His exhibition, “Nomader,” will be curated by Alison M. Gingeras, organized by the FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea, and commissioned by former San Martino captain regent Paolo Rondelli. Besides aligning with this theme, the title “Nomader” reflects Martinez’s own peripatetic past: His parents having divorced while he was still a child, he spent his youth shuttling among California, Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts. The experience influenced his practice, in which he bounces between abstraction and figuration to create graphic, vibrantly hued works that have drawn comparisons to artists as diverse as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston, Paul Klee, and Cy Twombly. Drawing, a habit Martinez picked up as a boy owing to the portability of the materials required, also features heavily in his oeuvre.

American artist Eddie Martinez will represent the Republic of San Marino, the small, landlocked country on the Italian peninsula, at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The exhibition will be curated by Alison M. Gingeras and will be realized by the FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea, with Paolo Rondelli, former head of state, serving as commissioner. Taking the title “Nomader,” the exhibition will bring together a suite of new paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Martinez is known best as a painter; his drawings and sculptures have not been exhibited as frequently.

In the artist Eddie Martinez’s dense, polychrome paintings, each mark is haunted by the gesture that made it and each color seems to demand its own verb: The thick gray drips; a bright red streak declares; a daub of blue hesitates. Even white pigment, which has frequently appeared in Martinez’s pieces since his 2018 “White Out” series, has a charged presence, boldly countering a base painting or washed thinly across the canvas so that the ghost of an underlying color peeks through. His teeming works seem, on the one hand, to be urgently composed, but the carefully accrued coats of paint — sprayed, silk-screened or directly applied from pigment sticks — also point to an artist who knows how to surrender to the pace set by his materials. “I need the paint to dry to produce the layers,” Martinez tells me one overcast afternoon in his studio in Ridgewood, Queens, ahead of his solo show at London’s Timothy Taylor gallery, opening October 12. The walls are hung with pieces in varying stages of completion. He pauses in front of one and leaves a single, deliberate stroke of brown. “I have to override my impatience for the sake of letting it become the painting it needs to become,” he says.

Sculpture in the Garden 2022: Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez includes 14 sculptures by the married couple, with 11 by Martinez and three by Moyer. The works date from 2016-2022, and several are monumental in size. Moyer’s work is installed at the center of round arbors or “rondels” crafted from locust wood harvested from the property. Martinez’s Half Stepping Hot Stepper is installed in a garden room hedged by Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) at the end of a long view. A second large untitled sculpture by Martinez is installed at the center of a large flowering bed, near a Linden allée. Smaller works by Martinez are installed near the subterranean grotto, a slightly below-ground gathering place on the south side of the garden.

“It’s pretty rare for two artists to succeed in a relationship together,” says Sam Moyer, in the front seat of her car alongside husband Eddie Martinez on a recent summer morning. The two artists have just dropped their young son off at camp and are sitting side-by-side to discuss their joint show at the South Etna Foundation in Montauk, where they were soon headed for the recent holiday weekend. The pair have welcomed two dual exhibitions out east: in addition to South Etna, which opened the first weekend of July, a sculpture show at Landcraft Garden in Mattituck, curated by Ugo Rondinone, opened in June. “It’s serendipity that they were the same summer,” says Moyer. “We were laughing about it, that we were gonna have the North Fork and the South Fork covered this summer.”

From 20th-century master painters to contemporary icons, prominent Hamptons artist couples have long captivated the imagination: Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian, April Gornik and Eric Fischl. This weekend, Eddie Martinez and Sam Moyer join the list of East End heavyweights when their pas de deux exhibit opens at the South Etna Montauk Foundation, founded in 2021 by Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann on the tip of Long Island’s South Fork. The show juxtaposes Moyer’s latest stone paintings—made from marble slabs and slate the artist sources from local quarries with a plaster underlay that references classic fresco and stucco walls—against Martinez’s recent paper-pulp works in his signature, electric language of abstract patterns and shapes, butterflies, flowers and mushrooms. Ahead of the show, the husband-and-wife talents reveal the secret to coexisting art practices.

An upcoming exhibition of the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Aspen’s Hexton Gallery (opening August 1), as well as the current and impressively monumental survey of French duo Les Lalanne at London’s Claridge’s and Ben Brown Fine Arts both offer the unique chance to better understand the gender dynamics of working married couples in the arts. However, as of Christo’s passing in May of 2020, all four have already left behind this mortal existence. But the new and concisely titled exhibition Eddie Martinez + Sam Moyer – opening tomorrow, July 2 at the South Etna Montauk Foundation – allows for a very different opportunity to view how those dynamics are playing out IRL in a very different, 21st Century context.

As the weekend getaways to the Hamptons begin to fill many art-lovers calendars, a garden in Mattituck promises the perfect stop in North Fork to enjoy another husband and wife’s joint show. Organized by New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone and Landcraft Garden Foundation, Sculpture in the Garden 2022 features works by Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez who are both primarily celebrated for their two-dimensional art. The show however invites visitors to explore the third dimension in their practices, featuring eleven sculptures by Martinez and three by Moyer. The elements of energy and texture in abstraction have been critical for both artists’ approach to surfaces, and with the outdoor sculptures, they further their experiments on similar notions with the vistas of a lush garden.

Art Basel Miami Beach has twice been disrupted by seismic world events. In 2001, what was to be the inaugural edition of the art fair was postponed a whole year in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Last year, the coronavirus pandemic was the culprit, though the live fair was replaced with an online viewing room.

In the intervening years, the fair became the linchpin of a booming Miami art scene and a larger cultural economy.

Now, as Art Basel returns to the Miami Beach Convention Center from Thursday through Saturday with 253 galleries from 36 countries and territories, it meets a pent-up demand — you could say that the supply chain for a certain kind of prestige fair has been unclogged.

Meaty and heady, Eddie Martinez’s densely packed paintings, rich with associations and imagery—all in the form of quotidian objects, sports paraphernalia, kitchen and dining items, art-history fragments—refuse to commit to a specific time or style. Martinez’s sensibility is part of a diffuse modernist past—Dada, Fluxus, Neo Realism, Cubism, Surrealism, food art, and so on—as well as a huge sampling of the contemporary zeitgeist, including skateboards and graffitied walls. In a canvas titled Embarcadero 88 (2020), frightening black-outlined, ghostlike faces stare out at us like terrified immigrants or victims of a natural disaster, while organic shapes punctuate paintings in the company of board games, lots of flowers, and playing cards.

It's sometimes unfair, as an observer of art, writer or (gulp) a critic to project onto an artist when it comes to intention or what you want from their work. I've tried to avoid it, but sometimes you have to recognize when you have borrowed a thought, or an observation, from an artist. I had this with Eddie Martinez a few years back, in the midst of an interview with him for the magazine. We were talking about his famed blockheads, but mostly we spoke about volume and process; this idea of "exhausting compositions." I loved it; the phrase felt so visual. He said, "But someone like Picasso, not only was he making all kinds of work in different mediums all the time, he was also exhausting the same sort of compositions and imagery because he just felt like they were always variable. That's something that has hit me. That's something I just respond to with his work right away because it feels natural to me anyway. And seeing someone who did it their whole life sort of gave me more confidence to do it."

There are few artists whose work is more in demand right now than Eddie Martinez. The Brooklyn-based painter’s large, thickly impastoed canvases—some figurative, some abstract, and most somewhere in between—have been winning over dealers, collectors, and curators for the better part of two decades. In the last three years, that deep-rooted support has metastasized into a rapidly accelerating and global market.

American painter Eddie Martinez has been busy in his Brooklyn studio working with both traditional and unconventional materials. “I have been working like a maniac, in fact, in my home studio, which I’m lucky enough to be able to do,” he says. Martinez has exhibited works from a series called White Outs over the past few years; in lockdown, he has continued to make drawings and paintings, fueled by emotion and anger.

What do you discuss when talking to a painter’s painter, the artist everyone cites as their favorite or an influential force? Well, you obviously talk about painting and painters. And, in the instance of sitting down with Brooklyn-based painter, Eddie Martinez, you chat about tennis, strategy and the art of collecting. There is an energy that emanates from Martinez’s work, something hypnotic that whirs in constant motion. In a way, his idea about “exhausting compositions” does not feel like defeat but instead, a powerful indicator that a life in art isn’t just one work, but about decades of output and practice. Martinez is fascinated by speed, but also comfortable in volume, as he explained throughout an early morning winter conversation. We talked about his massive 65-foot painting recently shown in Shanghai, a newborn altering his schedule, and how his flower pot works will show up in an upcoming show with his wife, Sam Moyer, in San Francisco. 

Painting might be summed up as a process of accretion: You start with a blank canvas and end with a covered one — unless you are Eddie Martinez, for whom the act of adding and subtracting remains in play throughout the making. Mr. Martinez’s assertive-but-sly approach is on view in “White Outs” at the Bronx Museum, a selection of recent, ostensibly white paintings.

Eddie Martinez makes being an artist look exhausting. He paces around his Brooklyn studio, then slowly approaches the canvas with an aerosol can. He makes a few marks, then steps back. He scrapes the paint before it has time to dry. Then he sits in an office chair, rolling himself closer and further away from the canvas. He looks a bit pained as he tries to figure out his next move. “I might be one of the most impatient people in the world,” the New York-based artist says in a 2012 interview for Art21’s “New York Close Up” digital series. “Certainly, at times I can’t control how the anxiety and impatience and aggressive energy comes out.”

Equally inspired by the New York School and street culture, Eddie Martinez has added a new element to his large-scale paintings by intentionally erasing parts of his compositions. This “white out” technique is informed by art history, as X-ray analysis of the work of the Old Masters often shows erased images hidden beneath the surface of the painting.

Martinez’s distinctive color sense—primary tones that are interrupted and shaped by black and white and some in-between hues—also follows his gut, and so far, so good. “It’s completely instinctual,” he says. “I don’t know color theory, and I’m not concerned if I’m doing it right or if I’m doing it wrong. It’s just the way I do it.”

The exhibition, titled Ants at a Picknic, which is on view until December 17, 2017, includes a series of new, frenetic large-scale mandala paintings, 17 tabletop painted bronze sculptures and drawings on paper. “The works in Ants at a Picknic make plain that Martinez has hit his stride,” said Dr. Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 director of the Davis Museum and curator of the exhibition. “The cosmic hooks, the summoning of spirits, the virtuoso line, the command of color and composition — it all adds up to its own kind of brilliance.”

Martinez doodles with a Sharpie, then blows up the sketch. The muscularity of his lines echoes his experience as a graffiti artist, and he walks a path between drawing and painting pioneered by Cy Twombly.

The black lines retain the doodle’s nonchalance, but the scale raises the stakes. Martinez fills in, paints over and around with self-effacing colors like avocado green and wan tomato red. He sprays, dabs, smudges and presses paint — his textures agitate, as do his rough, jagged lines. He tacks on bits of cloth. His signature, a bold “EM,” is part of the spiraling game board, too. 

Known for colorful paintings that recall midcentury abstraction, Martinez is plastering the Drawing Center with thousands of sketches that he will change throughout the exhibition’s run, a gesture that mimics his practice of keeping a wall in his studio reserved for drawings and studies. The show also includes paintings and large works on paper.  

There are about two thousand drawings all told, from idle doodles to sketches for paintings, and the cumulative, very happy effect is of being inside the artist’s brain. The Surrealist technique of automatic drawing meets the chutzpah of a hand that’s been known to tag walls with spray paint. Martinez has been swapping in new works as the show goes along, upping the ante on drawing from life—this is drawing as living.

“Eddie Martinez: Studio Wall” at the Drawing Center
Painter Eddie Martinez is never without pen and paper, drawing as he goes about his day and hanging the resulting drawings—created on the subway, at doctors’ appointments, and even at restaurants—on a wall in his Brooklyn studio. The artist will recreate this wall of artwork at Drawing Center, adding new pieces for the duration of the exhibition.

“I’m gonna grab my roller chair,” says Eddie Martinez. Which he does. We’re in Timothy Taylor in London looking at his new paintings. The very kind PR who has offered to get me a coffee has returned with it, but there’s nowhere to put it near us, with me standing and holding a phone as a mic, and Eddie sitting in his office roller chair, so the coffee sits slowly cooling on the side of the conversation like a gooseberry while we talk. I drink it on the way out and it’s still a nice temperature. If you get bored at any point reading this, think about the coffee.

Eddie is the kind of guy who gets himself a roller chair without asking if I’d like one too, but he also invites me to touch the paintings and explains them, and it’s all nice. He’s also apologetic about his self-professed inarticulacy and I should have told him that he didn’t need to be.

Timothy Taylor‘s “Cowboy Town” exhibition—which opened to the public on Thursday—gathers a series of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez. 

In a stunning exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash titled Salmon Eye (Martinez’s wife’s name is Sam), nine new paintings sit squarely on the walls in the 3400-square foot white cube. An amalgamation of abstraction and figuration, the work is so quintessentially Martinez and yet wildly different from what we’ve expected from the Brooklyn-based painter. On a cold night of drizzle, we visited Martinez’s new studio in Bushwick. The duplex space was expectedly cold, filled with neatly cluttered spray paint cans and large crayons. And for an hour, we talked shop, hitting on topics from self-care to artistic influences to why his new work feels just a little bit lighter. Here’s what he had to say.

The Brooklyn artist’s big, rambunctious, terrifically friendly canvases collapse seven decades of painting, reviving styles of the Cobra painters (Alechinsky, Jorn, Appel) and adding hints from Americans (de Kooning, Guston, Basquiat, Wool). Martinez silkscreens blowups of his spontaneous drawings and then has at them with oils, enamel, and spray paint. There’s lots of white space, in which black lines and flavorful colors frolic, keyed to what Martinez describes as the Cobra “embrace of the child’s hand.” Does the art world sometimes feel like school? Welcome to recess!

A detail of new work by EDDIE MARTINEZ featured in his first solo exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The large format paintings showcase Martinez’s bold brushstrokes and bold approach to traditional subject matter. For Salmon Eye, the artist builds upon his previous bodies of work by revealing a new dynamism in his narrative and deft approach to his canvases.

After “Matador,” a 2013 exhibition at the Journal Gallery in Brooklyn, Eddie Martinez sort of hated paint. “I had a negative reaction, I got really turned off by it,” said the artist, who found himself avoiding the studio after completing the works in the aforementioned show: Large, quasi-abstract canvases that serially explored the contours of a Picasso-esque bull. To deal with his creative block, Martinez started walking the beach on the North Fork of Long Island during the summer, pondering if three-dimensional work might be the way forward.

Eddie Martinez is indomitable. He is a prolific draftsman, an active curator, and he's getting ready to fill a four-story gallery in Seoul, South Korea, early next year. His idiosyncratic drawing style is deceptively simple and has the magical, faux naïve quality of Paul Klee. The 31-year-old's large studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is filled with ceramic miniatures he's been collecting for years. It also holds an extraordinary amount of work: charcoal drawings of his French bulldog, ink sketches of densely covered tabletops, and walls covered in large canvases. Martinez shows at ZieherSmith in Chelsea, New York, but has been spending more time on the South Shore in Massachusetts, where he has a second studio.
 

Currently on view at The Journal gallery in Brooklyn, this exhibition of works by New York-based, Eddie Martinez consists of five large-scale paintings, all derived from a single composition. These canvases, which form part of the ‘Matador’ series, are the product of Martinez’s endeavour to test and repeat, exhaustively, a basic arrangement of form and colour. For the artist, they are ‘a study in making the same painting, but differently.’

Eddie Martinez, who briefly attended art school in Boston and spent more time there working outdoors on graffiti art, has exceptional gifts as a painter and draftsman, which he exuberantly combines. Generally, he has not yet made them his own, but his third show at ZieherSmith suggests enough determination, industriousness and dexterity to get the job done.

Eddie Martinez’s paintings, drawings and etchings have a kitchen-sink quality to them: The painter seems to unload his full arsenal of skills, as well as the contents of his brain, onto every one. Composed of an assortment of images that almost add up to a communicable message, though not quite, his works read like rebuses or maniacal maps to lost treasure. In the large-scale Back Looker, for instance, an immense comic-book speech bubble emerges from the mouth of a supine daydreamer, with several of Martinez’s favorite motifs, including a duck’s face and a frog’s lips. In the artist’s deft hands, these childish doodles radiate a sinister energy.

Eddie Martinez is indomitable. He is a prolific draftsman, an active curator, and he's getting ready to fill a four-story gallery in Seoul, South Korea, early next year. His idiosyncratic drawing style is deceptively simple and has the magical, faux naïve quality of Paul Klee. The 31-year-old's large studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is filled with ceramic miniatures he's been collecting for years. It also holds an extraordinary amount of work: charcoal drawings of his French bulldog, ink sketches of densely covered tabletops, and walls covered in large canvases. Martinez shows at ZieherSmith in Chelsea, New York, but has been spending more time on the South Shore in Massachusetts, where he has a second studio.

Eddie Martinez’s promising solo debut is full of joyous work that creates its own entrancing world. His paintings and drawings feature a recurring cast of men in baseball hats, gliding parrots and coiled snakes who all stare at us with striking, overlarge eyes. They populate incongruous landscapes full of vivid pattern and color, unified by the visceral pleasure Martinez takes in their invention.

Eddie Martinez’s paintings come out of this practice of drawing, and there is a significant – you could say even an overarching – degree of compulsiveness to them.

In the exhibition “A Horse with No Name” the ostensible subject matter is drawn, so to speak, from Martinez’s immediate environment. Everything is diverse and diverting, as well as multicoloured: parrots, rooftops, baseball caps, bases of flowers, pictures, snakes, cats, road signs – and all are revisited again and again.