Enrique Martinez Celaya

Enrique Martínez Celaya
The artist in the Miami studio, 2013
Born 9 June 1964
Habana, Cuba
Nationality Cuban American
Education University of California, Santa Barbara
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
University of California, Berkeley
Cornell University
Known for Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Poetry, Writing
Website
martinezcelaya.com

Enrique Martínez Celaya (born 9 June 1964) is a contemporary artist who works in painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, and prose that are presented in contexts known as Environments. His artistic project pushes the boundaries and limits of art, literature, philosophy, and religion. Martínez Celaya uses the human figure in the landscape as a means to explore the nature of human experience and the search for meaning, which dwells in the transient world of time and memory, identity and displacement.

Life and Art

Early Life and Education

Tower of Snow, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Enrique Martínez Celaya was born in Habana, Cuba on June 9, 1964. He was uprooted at age eight to move with his family to Spain. Three years later, his family moved to Puerto Rico, where he was apprenticed to painter Bartolomé Mayol. His childhood experience of exile plays a formative role in his artistic practice.

Martínez Celaya came to the United States in 1982 as a physics student. He received a B.S. in applied physics from Cornell University in 1986 and pursued doctoral work in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He built a laser, received prizes from the Department of Energy and the National Congress of Science, achieved recognition and patents for his work at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Electronics Research Laboratory in Berkeley. While pursuing his research on lasers and laser delivery systems he continued to paint and write. On the verge of completing his doctorate in physics, Martínez Celaya abandoned his studies to pursue painting as a career, earning an M.F.A. with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Work & Selected Exhibitions

Martínez Celaya uses simple imagery heavy with symbolism, such as the solitary human figure in the landscape, birds, deer, rainbows, dogs, and apples heavy with snow. Despite these representational images, his work resists narrative and moves towards the iconic. It draws from the prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Herman Melville, and Lev Tolstoy; the poetry of Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Harry Martinson, and José Saramago; the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger, Hegel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; the paintings of Velasquez, Caspar David Friedrich, and Ferdinand Hodler; Kurt Schwitters's Hanover Merzbau; the social practice of Joseph Beuys and Paulo Freire; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and the music of Bach.

A Wasted Journey, A Half-Finished Blaze, Galleri Andersson/Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden

A Wasted Journey, A Half-Finished Blaze, Galleri Andersson/Sandström, Umeå, Sweden (2014): The exhibition showcases five new paintings and a sculpture of a bronze boy encrusted with large jewels crying onto a bed of pine needles. The work is a continuation of the artist's exploration of memory, suffering, longing for radiance, loneliness, and the possibility of art to be relevant to life.

The Pearl, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, (2013): An immersive environment in the gallery's 15000 square feet that included painting, sculpture, video, photography, waterwork, sound, and writing, as well as the artist's first musical arrangement. Citing aspects of the domestic as well as of the epic, of the small arm of individual histories as well as the big arc of time, the environment unearths memories seemingly left behind, and through this unearthing intimates there are secrets inherent in everything, particularly the familiar.

Boy with Horse, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NewYork

The Crossing, The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, New York (2010): A series of four monumental paintings made especially for and in response to the nave of the Cathedral that tests art's metaphysical and ethical potential.

Daybreak, L.A. Louver, Venice, California (2009): The environment consists of thirteen paintings and two sculptures that use the relationship of the solitary human figure to the vast and stark landscape to reflect on the nature and structure of experience, recollection, and aspiration.

Nomad series in progress in Miami studio

Nomad, Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2007): The exhibition consisted of five large-scale, oil-and-wax paintings, which explores issues of exile and rootlessness through the seasons. Inspired by the works of Swedish poet and Nobel Prize laureate Harry Martinson, the paintings evoke a dream-like state of suspension in which the exile lives: time passes and yet nothing changes.

Coming Home, the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2006): A re-installation and re-interpretation of Coming Home (2000), a sculptural group that consists of a boy and a gigantic deer, which was donated to the museum by well-known German collector Dieter Rosenkranz in honor of the University of Nebraska's commitment to Martínez Celaya's work. The sculpture group was presented within an ambitious photographic environment.

Schneebett, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

Schneebett, Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany (2004): The final stage in the artist’s Beethoven cycle, this large-scale installation uses Beethoven's deathbed as a means to reflect on the integrity of life decisions in confrontation with the finality of death. The project also included performances by the orchestra and a public lecture sponsored by the American Academy in Berlin. The installation was recreated as the inaugural exhibition for the Rosenkranz Kubus at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany (2006). With its focus on human frailty, it served as a counterpoint to Max Klinger's sculpture of Beethoven as a nationalist hero which is on view nearby.

Enrique Martinez Celaya is represented in Europe by Galeria Joan Prats (Barcelona) and Galleri Andersson/Sandström (Stockholm); in the United Kingdom by Parafin (London); and in the United States by L.A. Louver (Venice, California), John Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco), and Jack Shainman (New York).

Awards

Martínez Celaya was awarded the Brookhaven National Laboratory Fellowship (1986–1988), Interdisciplinary Humanities Fellow and Regents Fellow from the University of California (1992–94). He received Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art Here and Now Award (1998), the Hirsch Grant (2002), the Rosa Blanca Award from the Cuban Community (2002), and the California Community Foundation Fellowship, Getty Foundation Award (2004). He was honored with the Inaugural Colorado Contemporary Arts Collaborative Artist Residency at the CU Art Museum sponsored by Kent and Vicki Logan (2004). And he also received the Anderson Ranch Arts Center National Artist Award (2007). Recent awards include the Knight Foundation Grant (2013) and he was named Montgomery Fellow, Dartmouth College (2014) as well as the Cecil and Ida Green Honors Chair, Texas Christian University (2014).

Teaching

In 1994, Martínez Celaya was appointed Assistant Professor of Painting at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University, where he taught until 2003, when he resigned his tenured position of Associate Professor. He continues to be a popular and influential teacher throughout the country. He is currently a faculty member and board member at the well-known Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado. He was also appointed Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska (2007–2010), where he was to develop interdisciplinary conversations between artistic, religious, scientific, philosophical, and literary practice. In addition to these appointments, Martínez Celaya has lectured at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Aspen Institute, Joslyn Museum of Art (Omaha, Nebraska), Miami Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Hope Center (Richmond, Virginia), and the Berliner Philharmonie and the American Academy in Berlin.

Associations

Martínez Celaya joined the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at Cornell University, and through that organization, the Irving Literary Society.[1]

Books

Whale & Star Press

Martínez Celaya founded Whale and Star in 1998, a publishing house that specializes in art and art's relationship to other intellectual and creative fields, especially literature and philosophy. The University of Nebraska Press serves as Whale and Star's primary distributor. Recent titles include:

Martínez Celaya also created the watercolors for a children's book "The Return of the Storks" written by Lorie Karnath and published through Akira Ikeda Gallery in Berlin.

Quotes

"Being ethical away from the world is easier than in the world. I think some people see the path of abstraction as pure, uncompromised, but it could just be avoidance; artists who insist on removing their work from human struggles take a tidy path, which seems especially wasteful for those whose lives are in turmoil and confusion."[2]

"Time is an insurmountable gap only negotiated through memory, remembrance, regret, longing, love. I think we are rarely blessed with the ability to see the present for what it is—all that there is."[3]

"Today, to claim any significance or meaning, even if only to ourselves, is to flirt with ridicule."[4]

"What I have tried to do with my works is to observe--poorly, but better than I would've without art--who I am, who others are, and what the world is."[5]

"Authenticity involves living with the anxiety of death and creates responsibility for Being; certainly the end means we are accountable in life. Or perhaps more concretely: we are accountable at every moment. The final judgment, so apparent in the bed-of-death, is not just at the end, but is always upon us--and every moment, our last."[6]

Collections

Martínez Celaya's work is in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including:

Selected Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Cornell University Residence Plan of 1966, Schedule I, Appendix A (May 3, 1966)(see sixth page of document noting the relationship between Phi Kappa Psi and the Irving Literary Society)); see also’’, List of Phi Kappa Psi/Irving Literary Society Members (Aug. 18, 2011).
  2. ↑ Richard Whittaker (2004), A conversation with Enrique Martínez Celaya: Self and beyond self, works + conversations, retrieved 2008-04-25
  3. ↑ L. Kent Wolgamott (2004), A conversation between L. Kent Wolgamott and Enrique Martínez Celaya, Lincoln Journal Star, retrieved 2008-04-25
  4. ↑ Quoted in Daniel A. Siedell, "Enrique Martínez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief," Religion and the Arts 10/1 (2006): 59.
  5. ↑ "Schneebett Statement" in "EMC Comments" at www.martinezcelaya.com
  6. ↑ "Self and Beyond Self: A Conversation with Enrique Martínez Celaya," works + conversations 9 (October 2004): 13.

External links

Official Enrique Martínez Celaya Website
Official Whale & Star Press
Official Schneebett
Enrique Martínez Celaya on Instagram
Enrique Martínez Celaya on Facebook