Eddie Martinez joined Blum & Poe’s artist roster.
Eddie Martinez has joined Blum & Poe’s artist roster. The Brooklyn-based artist, renowned for his vibrant canvases that walk the line between abstraction and figuration, will present a solo exhibition of new work at the gallery’s Los Angeles space in 2021. Martinez will continue to be represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, as well as Perrotin.
Martinez’s work, which spans painting, drawing, and sculpture, is notable for the inclusion of a wide array of materials, including spray paint, silkscreen, oil, enamel, and acrylic. His bold, gestural style is informed by a lineage of avant-garde movements including action painting and the CoBrA movement, as well as the wild figuration of artists such as Philip Guston and Peter Saul.
Bill Powers described Martinez’s art in a statement:
Martinez’s practice isn’t inherently rooted in the abstract or representational, suffice to say that he plays for his own team. At its core, the art of Eddie Martinez operates along the fault lines of thought and association. Without thinking we are quick to triangulate elements of his pictures, much in the manner of a Rorschach test, but upon further consideration the choices made in his mark making give rise to the art historical, the autobiographical and ephemeral without succumbing to hierarchy.
Martinez has exhibited extensively over the course of his nearly 20 year career. In 2017, he had two institutional solo shows, “Studio Wall” at the Drawing Center in New York and “Ants at a Picknic” at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum in Massachusetts. The following year, he showed at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and in 2019, he had another two solo shows, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. Martinez’s work has also appreciated enormously on the secondary market— the market value for Martinez’s 2009 canvas, Up in Arms #2 rose nearly 2,780% over the course of the last seven years.
According to Artsy data, demand for Martinez’s work has seen a steady increase of at least 25 percent year-over-year since 2014, save for a small dip in inquiries in 2017. Thus far in 2020 there have been more than 11 times as many inquiries on Martinez’s work on Artsy than there were in all of 2014.
