ASPEN, CO.- The Baldwin Gallery presents their 5th show of new work by acclaimed contemporary artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. Enrique Martínez Celaya, whose works consists of paintings, sculpture, photography, poetry, and prose, is showing new paintings at the gallery in a show entitled “The Palace”.

Martínez Celaya’s paintings directly engage with personal life experience and delve into his background in literature, philosophy, and religion, thus resonating on a subconscious societal level. Mysterious and often autobiographical figures appear in dream-like landscapes and primal forces are manifested in his symbolic imagery. The lone figure amid a landscape pose intricate questions regarding the human experience with time, memory, identity, and displacement as well as lead the viewer through a quest for meaning. Martínez Celaya’s work further investigates the dialogue between the subconscious and the modern theology of science.

Enrique Martínez Celaya was born in Palos, Cuba in 1964 but was relocated with his family when he was eight years old to Spain. Three years following, his family moved to Puerto Rico, where he was apprenticed to a painter. (Martínez Celaya’s childhood encounter with exile plays a seminal role in his art).

Martínez Celaya came to the United States in 1982 as a physics student and received a BS in applied physics from Cornell University and an MS in quantum electronics from the University of California, Berkeley. On the cusp of completing his doctorate in physics, he abandoned his physics studies to pursue painting. He earned his MFA with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and received a fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

In 1998 Martínez Celaya started a small publishing house called Whale and Star Press, which is the platform on which the artist pledges his ethical responsibility while also exploring other intellectual and creative fields, specifically literature and philosophy. His work is in the permanent collections of The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Sheldon Museum of Art Lincoln, Nebraska, Denver Art Museum, Miami Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany, among many others.

Martínez Celaya is the recipient of various highly-acclaimed awards, has served as a painting professor at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University, and is currently a faculty member at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. He has also been appointed Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska (2007-2010), where he is developing interdisciplinary conversations between artistic, religious, scientific, philosophical, and literary practices. Martínez Celaya currently lives and works in Miami, Florida, and his art is widely exhibited and collected in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.