Installation image, Enrique Martínez Celaya The Word-Shimmering Sea: Diego Veláquez, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist's studio.
San Francisco, September 19, 2024—Gallery Wendi Norris proudly announces its representation of acclaimed Cuban-born, American artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. 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."
"Enrique has an inquisitive drive and a profound search for meaning through art. He infuses his work with scientific, philosophical, and poetic knowledge, resulting in art of great authenticity and consequence," says gallery founder Wendi Norris. "My team and I are thrilled to share our enthusiasm for Enrique’s work with the gallery’s engaged audience."
Martínez Celaya’s current and upcoming museum exhibitions, include There-bound at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA; The Grief of Almost at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; and The Sextant at the Wende Museum in Culver City, CA. In the last two years, he has also been the subject of notable solo exhibitions at The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; Museo Marino Marini, Florence; and the Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Gallery Wendi Norris will present an expansive first solo exhibition for Martínez Celaya in March-April, 2025 in San Francisco.
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 and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he was also a Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar.
His 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.
He is the author of nine books on art, philosophy, and poetry, including two volumes of his Collected Writings and Interviews (University of Nebraska Press: 2020 and 2010), tracing three decades of the artist’s creative thought. His work has also been the focus of several monographic publications, including two recent books by Hatje Cantz, Berlin: Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything and Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen.
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.
