On Wednesday, April 9 at 6 – 7:30 pm, Gallery Wendi Norris will host a conversation between artist Enrique Martínez Celaya and Professor Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University’s Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, in celebration of The Wilderness, Martínez Celaya's first exhibition with the gallery.
Exploring fragility, endurance, displacement, and longing through an intricate and confrontational interplay between humanity and nature, The Wilderness features Martínez Celaya's latest suite of large-scale paintings. Renowned for fusing science, philosophy, poetics, and literature into his deeply personal and humanistic works, Martínez Celaya will be joined by Professor Alexander Nemerov, who is equally celebrated for his eloquent and engaging lectures at Stanford University and around the country.
Registration is required due to limited seating. Please register here.
About the speakers
Enrique Martínez Celaya is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts in the history of the University of Southern California and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he was also a Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Through his paintings, sculptures, installations, and writing, Martínez Celaya explores the exilic imagination, blending reality, myth, and memory to create poetic works that range from the semi-autobiographical to the resonantly universal. He describes his work as an open-ended, existential inquiry simultaneously addressing the "big gears of nature and the small gears of human experience."
Alexander Nemerov is the author most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as “one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender.” His book Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was praised by Vogue as one of its best books of the year and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 2021. Nemerov teaches art history at Stanford University.
Image credits: Portrait of Enrique Martínez Celaya by Kwaku Alston; Portrait of Alexander Nemerov by Suszi Lurie McFadden.
