Florence, at the Museo Marino Marini the first exhibition in Italy by Enrique Martínez Celaya

From March 31 to May 29, 2023, the Museo Marino Marini in Florence presents the exhibition Looking and Waiting: Enrique Martínez Celaya. Selected Sculptures 2005-2023, the first exhibition in Italy by artist Enrique Martínez Celaya (Havana, 1964) born in Cuba and living in Los Angeles. Trained as a painter, in more than 30 years of artistic practice, Martínez Celaya has also experimented with sculpture, photography, video and writing, investigating through all these media the fundamental relationships between man and the world. His figurative language is rooted in nature, starting with common and familiar images such as trees, flowers, rivers, skies, the sea, as well as animals and human figures. The initial simplicity of this imagery, however, soon gives way to alienating elements, a deeper, opaque and unstable experience that lurks immediately beneath the surface.

The Marino Marini Museum in Florence, dedicated to the celebrated Italian artist, holds 183 works by Marini in its permanent collection, including many sculptures, including monumental ones. Looking and Waiting, curated by Giorgio Verzotti, therefore turns specific attention precisely to Martínez Celaya’s sculpture, creating a dialogue between the works and the rooms that house them. In the works presented in Florence, the flickering images of his paintings become concrete objects in bronze, concrete, wax or wood, sharing space with the viewer and intensifying his or her personal involvement. Through sculpture Martínez Celaya explores highly personal and intimate conceptsthat characterize the emotional journey of life, such as memory, loss, vulnerability fortitude, ephemerality and hope.

“For the artist,” says curator Giorgio Verzotti, "each of his works, whether painting or sculpture, is a fragment of a narrative that is never explicated; it is the witness of an event, whether past or still in progress, that the viewer is called upon to interpret, overcoming the impression of extraneousness and resistance that the work itself seems at first sight to oppose. Watching and Waiting is thus not only the title of the exhibition, but also the indication of a hoped-for attitude: that is, that observation takes all the time necessary for the work to eventually become explicit, from the hermetic that it is, and the narrative to unfold, albeit through enigmatic passages."

Martínez Celaya’s sculptures are in fact presented as fragments of a story that, in their physicality, occupy the space in which the visitor moves. They seem to be a permanent version of what is usually a fleeting act: crying, sitting, raising an arm, sheltering.

The wide variety of materials and languages adopted by the artist in the exhibition creates a kind of landscape inhabited by works-worlds, universes of meaning different from each other or, if you will, a scenario built on free psychological associations, often deliberately incongruent. A seated figure, one could not tell whether male or female, is defined in burnt wood, uniformly black but provided with bear fur covering her spine; two somewhat awkward white concrete figures are joined in an embrace, while the statue of a boy who is lifting an arm is in bronze painted white but wearing real canvas breeches. Solid and traditional materials such as bronze in fact can generate “impossible” figures, such as the accumulation on the ground of black heads of liocorns, or such as the male head, leaning against a base almost as if it were decapitated, generating its double by parthenogenesis. Two works stand out for their structural complexity and for the emotional impact they generate: on the one hand, a deer hangs inside a metal structure by means of iron wires, and on its white fiberglass body we read a handwritten sentence by Eliot about the precariousness of existence; on the other, a real metal aviary houses the statue of a boy with a contrite air and a gaze turned to the ground, and only when we get closer do we discover that it too is built like an aviary.

Enrique Martinez Celaya is thus a storyteller who expresses himself through enigmas, and if there is a common trait that unites his multifarious creations this is the sense of transience, the attraction to what does not persist, what constantly becomes and what desire uselessly always wants to stop. Like the burning boy, in the painting we first see in this exhibition, impermanence also involves the sculptures in their solid body bearer, however, of incongruity: they are momentary concretions of an uninterrupted flow of surprising suggestions.

In addition, the occasion of the exhibition at the Marino Marini Museum, Secci Gallery is hosting a solo show of the artist’s pictorial works from May 5 to July 29, 2023, at its venue instead.

Biographical notes.

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author and former physicist whose works have been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, Distinguished Professor for the MFA in Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, and Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He has produced exhibitions, projects and interventions in museums, galleries and other cultural venues, including the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Germany. His works are in 56 international public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. Martínez Celaya is the author of numerous books, including the two volumes Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010-2017 and 1990-2010, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020 and 2011; and The Nebraska Lectures, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. His work has been the subject of several monographic publications, including Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: toward a map of everything, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021; Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2021, Martínez Celaya, Work and Documents 1990-2015, Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2016, and Enrique Martínez Celaya: Working Methods, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2012.

Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He began his formal art training as a painter’s apprentice at the age of 12. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics and a minor in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a Master of Science degree with a specialization in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted part of his physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and holds several laser device patents. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and received an MFA with highest honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was also a Regents Fellow and Junior Fellow of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. In 1997 he was awarded the Art Here and Now prize by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1998, Martínez Celaya created the publishing house Whale & Star, which publishes books on art, poetry, art practice and critical theory. Prior to his current academic appointments, he held the positions of Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska, and Associate Professor at Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University. In 2020 he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from Otis College of Art and Design, where he gave the commencement address. He is a member of the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Otis College of Art and Design, was artistic advisor to the Anderson Ranch Arts Center from 2018 to 2021, where he received the National Artist Award in 2007, and is a member of the International Advisory Council of the Hispanic Society of America. He has lectured around the world, including the American Academy in Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Drawing School, and the Aspen Institute.

Image: Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Hours (2022; bronze)

Florence, at the Museo Marino Marini the first exhibition in Italy by Enrique Martínez Celaya

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