Enrique Mart’nez Celaya, 1992 - 2000
August 24 ö October 21, 2001

The Contemporary Museum has organized the first one-person museum exhibition of the work of Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Mart’nez Celaya (b. 1964). Comprising 70 works in various media that trace Mart’nez Celaya's development from his early mature works to present, this exciting exhibition and its accompanying 280-page catalogue provide an important examination of the highly regarded young artistâs career.

Mart’nez Celayaâs work has attracted significant international attention, appearing in over 20 solo exhibitions and 40 group exhibitions. His works also are housed in several major museum collections, including those of The Contemporary Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany.

The artistâs evolving vision is shaped by circumstances, experiences and memories ö of his youth spent in Cuba, Spain and Puerto Rico, his education in physics (B. S., 1986, Cornell University) and art (M.A., 1994, University of California, Santa Barbara), and influential figures in his life. One such figure was Bartoldo Mayol, the artist to whom Mart’nez Celaya was apprenticed at age eleven and who instilled in him a love for the process of making art. Another was the late, beloved Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges, to whose memory the artist dedicates his part in this exhibition.

Mart’nez Celaya cannot be categorized by repetitive use of a single style, medium or format. He moves with characteristic fluidity from painting to sculpture to drawing to photography. He is also a poet, and his art works reveal a link to literary concerns and practices. For visual artists and poets, metaphor is a common device, in which the creative mind juxtaposes disparate elements to expose new meanings. In the artistâs own words, "·something new will emerge, something that was maybe hidden by appearances. So the relationships between these things are not really intended to be poetic, as in Îfloweryâ, but as in essential to some truth."

Interested in the gray area between experience and representation, and in the relationship between fragmentation and wholeness, Mart’nez Celaya has explored notions of symbolism, hermeticism, displacement, time, remembrance, mortality, identity and beauty. His work has also questioned the nature of the objects he presents, as well as the possibilities of visual media and the limitations ö perhaps inadequacy ö of representation itself.

In Mart’nez Celaya's works, the mental and physical act of making appears paramount. The process/progress of his mind and hand are often plainly visible in the marks and changes, the drips and floods of pigment that spill across canvas and paper. This process of making art is for Mart’nez Celaya both a conscious and instinctive dialogue with himself. As he works, reworks, adds and removes, he seems responsive to trying almost anything: not hesitating but always pressing forward, never accepting his first solution as final. What emerges is an impassioned, very personal vision of exceptional beauty and a voice simultaneously mysterious, elegiac, poetic, psychologically charged and deeply concerned with meaning.

Following its presentation at The Contemporary Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, and to the Sandra and David Bakalar Gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

This exhibition is supported by Carol Salisbury and by Jennifer and Royce Diener. Additional support has been provided by the following: Cade Roster and Waileia Davis; Dieter and Si Rosenkranz; CSX Lines; Persis Corporation; Neuberger Berman, LLC Fund at The New York Community Trust; Pomona College; the HawaiÎi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts; American Airlines; and Aston Hotels and Resorts.