Enrique Martínez Celaya | The Wilderness

Gallery Wendi Norris Headquarters

436 Jackson Street, San Francisco

Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite

38 Hotaling Place, San Francisco

“But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

– Fiona MacLeod, The Lonely Hunter (1896)

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to announce The Wilderness, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Cuba). This marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and follows a year of significant solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (New York), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH). The Wilderness—which explores fragility, endurance, displacement, and longing through an intricate and confrontational interplay between humanity and nature—unfolds across two San Francisco locations: the gallery’s headquarters and a landmarked carriage house directly across the street in the historic heart of Jackson Square.

The Wilderness features a new cycle of nine paintings. The luminously layered, predominantly large-scale canvases embody an emotional quality and evoke an immersive and vast environment. The paintings are also precise in their imagery: doors, wildlife, or portraits of the archetypal artist as an old man anchor the iconic compositions. The works in this exhibition also underscore Martínez Celaya’s ongoing dialogue with the nature of painting itself, and its capacity to create and sustain meaning. Painting, for him, is an act of labor and inquiry, a delicate balance between seeking and surrendering.

Significant to this body of work is—for the first time in Martínez Celaya’s thirty-year career—the recurring motif of “the artist,” portrayed in these paintings not as a heroic figure, but as a reflective consciousness. In the artist’s words, The Wilderness is “the haunting undercurrent and envelope of my life: the territory of Being, mapped by memory and a longing that seeks to close the gap between self, other, and world. The ‘wilderness’ I am addressing here is both outside and inside. It is the wilderness awaiting consciousness as it takes in the world, and it is the unexplored wilderness within ourselves.”

The artist will be in conversation with Professor Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University’s Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Department of Art and Art History, on Wednesday, April 9 at 6 pm, in the exhibition’s 38 Hotaling Place offsite location. The event is free; however, reservations are recommended.

ABOUT Enrique Martínez Celaya

Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Cuba) is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts in the history of the University of Southern California. 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."

Martínez Celaya’s recent exhibitions include Diego Velázquez/Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Word-Shimmering Sea at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York (2024), Los muertos llaman al alba at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana (2024), and The Grief of Almost at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover (2024), which is on view through April 6, 2025. This fall, Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant will open at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, where it will be on view through 2026.

Martínez Celaya’s work is part of the collections of over sixty leading international museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Martínez Celaya trained as an artist and physicist at Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives and works in Los Angeles.