NEW YORK, NY.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash annunced its fifth solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez. Wavelengths features nine new paintings and will be on view to March 9, 2024. Over the past two decades, Martinez has become known for his striking and energetic style of painting, part of an expansive practice that includes painted bronze sculptures, works on paper and printmaking. Deftly layering oil, acrylic and enamel paint, and employing an ever-evolving vocabulary of characters and symbols, Martinez has cultivated a style uniquely his own.

Many of the new paintings featured in Wavelengths belong to Martinez’s ongoing Whiteouts series. Started in 2015, he has continuously returned to this series in which a colorful, underlying painting is covered with white paint. Ranging from a thick impasto to a thin wash, the final layer reads as a veil over the surface, softening but not hiding the vibrant image beneath.

With Full Bloom, Martinez returns to his well-known flowerpot series. A cartoonish flower emerges from a spherical pot, its petals pressing just beyond the edge of the canvas. Rich blues, reds, yellow and greens peek through but are obscured by both a thin whitewash and an opaque white line. The background and foreground collapse into each other, dissolving the flower into abstract, geometric building blocks. With another flowerpot painting, New Growth, Martinez pushes this idea further as the flowerpot composition seems to disassemble and reassemble before the viewer’s eyes.

In the largest painting in the show, Recent Growth, familiar forms jostle together in a visual cacophony: a leaf, a tennis ball, a flower, a blockhead. With no discernable focal point, the viewer’s eye travels from edge to edge, top to bottom revealing a lyrical dance of addition and subtraction, definition and erasure.

Eddie Martinez’s work joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways. Imbued with a sense of personal iconography, his practice often combines signature elements, such as bug-eyed humans wearing eclectic headgear, blockheads and Buflies. Energetic and raw, his artworks employ an aggressive use of color and texture through various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint, collage and detritus picked up from the studio floor. Martinez’s unconventional practice has received growing institutional support, with five museum solo shows in the last four years, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, both 2019, and at the Bronx Museum in 2018. His sixth solo show opens in March 2024 at Space K in Seoul, South Korea. His works are represented in international public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; National Gallery of Art, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Washington D.C.; Museo National Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.

MITCHELL-INNES & NASH
Eddie Martinez: Wavelengths
February 1–March 9, 2024