VENICE, CA.- L.A. Louver presents a solo exhibition of new works by Enrique Martínez Celaya. This is the artist’s fourth show with L.A. Louver. The exhibition, titled "Lone Star", will be on view from April 9 to May 16, 2015 at L.A. Louver located at 45 North Venice Boulevard.
The beginning and end points of the exhibition experience are marked by two installations. In the first floor south gallery, a bronze sculpture of a young boy stands in a pool of water; tiled mirrors cover the surrounding walls. Facing away from the viewer, the figure’s fragmented reflection reveals tears that trickle from the boy’s eyes into the pool below. The visitor is also implicated in the scene through her reflection; a single light illuminates the space; the sound of the tears dropping into the pool creates a multi-sensorial immersive experience. The second installation, in the gallery’s open-air Skyroom, features the same boy who now stands within a mesh wire cage shaped like a house. Holes in the figure’s chest serves as a refuge for five live birds that live within the cage.
Paintings and sculptures, presented throughout the first and second floor galleries, navigate between these two installations, and according to Martínez Celaya, “point to a world that is familiar and unknown, radiant and brutal, personal and vast.” The trajectory of the narrative imbued within the collective whole is mysterious and haunting. Imagery provides the context by which the narrative unfolds -- sunlight, birds, glass and water manifest wonderment, while skates and rays, cages, fire, bridges and the evocation of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s childhood home provoke darker connotations.
Through this entire experience, infused with themes of innocence, loss, hope, possibility and dreams, the artist attempts to stir the conscious and subconscious understanding of becoming. “I do not think of this body of work as an assembly of individual artworks and writings,” states Martínez Celaya. “Instead, I approach it as a totality or as an environment where one artwork is revealed or hidden by another. Throughout this environment the friction between images and their negation suggests the instability of recognition. This instability and the layering of ideas bring about circuitous discoveries as well as reflective or indirect recognitions, often the only kind of recognition available to us.”
Born in Cuba, Martínez Celaya spent much of his childhood in Spain and Puerto Rico. As a young boy, he developed interests in art, science, philosophy and literature, which led him to study Applied & Engineering Physics at Cornell University; and to pursue a degree in Quantum Electronics at University of California, Berkeley. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Martínez Celaya was Associate Professor of Art at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University (1994-2003). He was honored as the second Presidential Professor in the history of the University of Nebraska, was selected as Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth, and is a Trustee of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Awards include the California Community Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Here and Now Award, the Hirsh Grant, and Anderson Ranch National Artist.
Martínez Celaya has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. His work can be found in the public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Denver Art Museum, CO; Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Martínez Celaya currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
