Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: Enrique Martínez Celaya and Leonora Carrington

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to return to Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 with a presentation of paintings by Enrique Martínez Celaya, complemented by a special Kabinett display of a dozen works on paper by Leonora Carrington. Exploring how both artists’ practices are deeply influenced by their experiences of exile, the booth offers a contrast between Martínez Celaya’s emotionally charged, monumental paintings and Carrington’s intimately scaled and intricately detailed works on paper.

For Martínez Celaya’s first presentation in Miami in nearly a decade, the booth will feature new and recent paintings that expand the artist’s recent, celebrated body of work. Born in and uprooted from his home in Cuba, he extracts meaning and memory from this unsettled upbringing, capturing the imagination's capacity to create spaces of resistance and possibility in response to displacement. Through an ambitious interplay between humanity and nature, longing and endurance, Martínez Celaya’s large-scale works turn on poignant, existential questions that fuse the personal with the universal.

Leonora Carrington’s intimately scaled and intricately detailed works on paper—some of which have never been exhibited publicly—reflect the impact of exile on her artistic practice. Thematically complementing the main booth’s display of new work by Martínez Celaya that explores the exilic imagination, Carrington’s oeuvre reconciled her upbringing in the UK and young adulthood in France with her life in Mexico, to which she fled in the midst of World War II. These works straddle cultures and act as a bridge connecting Carrington’s European roots to the diverse influences she encountered in her new home, as she merged old myths with novel landscapes and conveyed a sense of both nostalgia and discovery. 

Gallery Wendi Norris’ presentation coincides with “The Sextant” (November 2025 – October 2026), Enrique Martínez Celaya’s solo exhibition at the Wende Museum in Culver City, CA, and follows acclaimed solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society in New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Cuba, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth.

The presentation also coincides with a solo exhibition dedicated to Leonora Carrington at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (on view through January 2026)—the first in Italy to focus on the artist—which will travel to Paris in 2026. Masterpieces from Carrington’s oeuvre are also on view in “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” the Philadelphia Art Museum’s major exhibition celebrating the birth of Surrealism (November 2025 – February 2026).