Category Archives: Enrique Martínez Celaya

Museo Marino Marini, Firenze

31.03 – 29.05.2023

Opening 31.03.2023, 6pm

 

From March 31 to May 29, 2023, Museo Marino Marini in Florence is pleased to present Watching and Waiting: Enrique Martínez Celaya Selected Sculptures 2005-2023, the first exhibition in Italy by Cuban-born and Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. Trained as a painter, in over thirty years of artistic practice, Martínez Celaya has also explored sculpture, photography, video and writing, investigating through all these media the fundamental relationships between human beings and the world. His figurative language takes root in nature, using common and familiar images such as trees, flowers, rivers, skies, the sea, but also animals and human figures. The initial simplicity of this imagery, however, gives way to a deeper, opaque and unstable experience that lies beneath the surface.

 

Museo Marino Marini in Florence, dedicated to the famous Tuscan artist, has 183 works by Marini in its permanent collection, including many sculptures, some of them monumental. Watching and Waiting, curated by Giorgio Verzotti,therefore pays specific attention on Martínez Celaya’s sculpture, in dialogue with the rooms that host it. For the first time in this exhibition, the artist transforms the flickering images of his paintings into concrete objects in bronze, cement, wax or wood, which share space with the viewer and intensify his personal engagement. Sculpture thus becomes a powerful medium through which Martínez Celaya explores highly personal and intimate concepts that shape the emotional journey of life, such as memory, loss, vulnerability, strength of spirit, the ephemeral and hope.

 

Martínez Celaya’s sculptures appear as fragments of a story or poem that, in their materiality, occupy the space in which the visitor moves. They seem to be a permanent version of what is usually a fleeting act: weeping, sitting, raising an arm, sheltering. They play the function of witnesses, intensified by their immobility. Immobility that does not want to be impassibility, but rather resistance, determination, waiting and patience, as the title of the exhibition, Watching and Waiting, underlines.

 

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The Rose Garden. ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA

 

February 16 – March 12, 2022

 

UTA Artist Space.

403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills, CA

 

 

 

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, February 16, 6-8PM

 

 

UTA Artist Space and Unit London are pleased to announce a new immersive environment by the celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Rose Garden ambitiously brings together new paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, garments, and writing, inviting viewers to consider the self—both its promise and its threat—through the mystical divination of memory.

 

 

 

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

 

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (from Four Quartets)

 

 

 

For over two decades, Martínez Celaya has explored the limitless connections between art, literature, philosophy, and science through his practice. In this new and multifaceted body of work, the artist uses T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as an entry point to exploring our collective memory—something broader, more permanent, and more irreparable than individual memory, and which belongs to us all. 

 

In this exhibition, as in past projects, Martínez Celaya again concerns himself with existential hunger, crisis, chaos, order, time, redemption, reality, and love—here tied together by the thread of Eliot’s words. As visitors enter UTA Artist Space’s main gallery, they will encounter Eliot’s poem written at their feet, and a series of large paintings depicting ice, sea, and fire, urging a meditation on the ever-changing, complicated nature of time and memory.

 

All three of UTA Artist Space’s galleries will be assumed by Martínez Celaya’s immersive environments, including a room of tears overlooked by a blood moon, photographs of gardens and bodies, a burnt figure on a seat of roses, a garment worn by love champions, and many other luminous chunks mined from life. Viewed collectively, these works and the artist’s concurrent solo exhibitions at Los Angeles museums—at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; USC Fisher Museum of Art; and Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library—remind us of the power art has to change our perceptions of the world and of our inner selves.

 

 

 

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Sea Sky Land: towards a map of everything. Martínez Celaya.

 

USC Fisher Museum of Art. February 2 – April 9, 2022

 

 

USC Fisher Museum of Art presents Enrique Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything. SEA SKY LAND brings together approximately 30 large-format paintings and sculptures created by the artist between 2005 and 2020. While Martínez Celaya has had numerous museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide over the last two decades, this is the first time the arc of his practice will be revealed in a Southern California museum since 2001.

 

Martínez Celaya’s philosophical and poetic probing in writings plays an integral part in his artistic practice. Together these works suggest a map of sorts, and this artistic, poetic, and intellectual mapping reveals a territory shaped by self, time, memory, meaning, myth, ideations of home, and the world as it is. Each of the three galleries at the Fisher Museum will present the artist’s writings alongside paintings and sculptures dedicated to one of three motifs—sea, sky, and land.

 

 

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The Well (2014): The installation of a 13-foot-tall bronze piece by Enrique Martínez Celaya heralds a re-imagining of the arts at the university.

 

The Well, unveiled in a ceremony Aug. 24, is the latest example of the university’s commitment to art in public spaces. With it, USC celebrates a new era of public art.

 

The unveiling was hosted by USC’s President, Dr. Carol Folt. Other attendees were Selma Holo, Director of the Fisher Museum of Art, Mei-Lee Ney, collector and philanthropist, and Enrique Martinez Celaya himself

 

The Well is permanently installed in front of the Fisher Museum of Art at the University of Southern California.  ⁣The Fisher was the first art museum in Los Angeles.

 

 

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ARCO E-xhibitions. 

 

 

THE YEAR SLIPS ON THE CALENDAR

 

 

ERICK BELTRÁN, CABELLO/CARCELLER, VICTORIA CIVERA, CARLES CONGOST, LUIS GORDILLO, ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA, MUNTADAS, JAVIER PEÑAFIEL, PEREJAUME, JULIÃO SARMENTO, TERESA SOLAR, JUAN USLÉ

 

Tras un año 2020 en el que creímos posible una transformación radical de nuestras vidas, debido a un evento mundial e imprevisible como fue la pandemia, este 2021 sentimos que todo vuelve a empezar y, pese a todo lo que aprendimos, en el fondo, deseamos volver a lo anterior.

 

En la primavera del año pasado, nos atrevimos a pedirles a los y las artistas de la galería que participasen en una exposición que pudimos presentar en verano, con trabajos realizados durante el confinamiento. La realización de estas obras supuso, en algunos casos, una vía de escape, en otros, una herramienta para continuar trabajando pese a las dificultades y, a la vez, permitieron al público introducirse en la intimidad de los estudios y de las cabezas de sus creadores.

 

El resultado de la petición fue una serie de obras muy diversas, algunas de las cuales ahora volvemos a presentar para poder contemplarlas con una nueva mirada, que nos permite entender el pasado y proyectarnos hacia el futuro.

 

 

Descubre nuestro stand en 2D y en 3D

Hosted by The Brooklyn Rail, Friday, January 29, 1pm ET / 10am PT.

 

Artist and writer Enrique Martínez Celaya joins art critic and author Eleanor Heartney for a conversation. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from David St. John.

 

Register

 

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya

 

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former scientist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world, and he is the author of books and papers in art, poetry, philosophy, and physics. His work is held in over 50 public collections internationally, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He has created projects and exhibitions for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, among many others, as well as for institutions customarily outside of the art world, including the Berliner Philharmonie, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York, and the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin.

 

Martínez Celaya is the first person to hold the position of Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California. He is also the first Visual Arts Fellow of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, a Fellow of The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, the first Visual Arts Fellow of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he is also a Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar. He received his degrees from Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara in physics and art.

 

 

Eleanor Heartney

 

Eleanor Heartney is well known as a curator and critic, a long-time contributing editor of Art in America and the author of numerous books, including Art & Today, Postmodernism, and After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art.