Patricia Low Contemporary is delighted to announce the representation of Los Angeles-based artist, author and former physicist Enrique Martínez Celaya (born in 1964). In summer 2024, Martínez Celaya will have his first solo show with the gallery, presenting a new body of work at Patricia Low Venezia, opening June 15th, to coincide with the 60th Venice Biennale Strangers Everywhere. In April 2024, Martínez Celaya will stage The Word-Shimmering Sea at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, an immersive interaction with Diego Velázquez‘s painting Portrait of a Little Girl (ca. 1638–42).
The Cuban-born artist and polymath’s works explore timely, timeless subjects of exile and belonging in oneiric visions of figures and landscapes. Maps, scraps of text, and wraithlike creatures variously feature in his paintings, which call to mind mental as much as physical landscapes. Recent works have focused on the sea, with outsize flowers floating in the foreground. Evocative of a childhood memory, in which a floral scent, believed to be an omen, would sometimes permeate the beach town in Cuba where Martínez Celaya‘s grandparents lived, these paintings have a charged symbolism, and a sense of longing, that suffuses all of the artist’s work.
Martínez Celaya‘s work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions worldwide. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. Notable projects and exhibitions include the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Museo Marino Marini, Florence, the Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, among many others. His work is held in 57 public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
