Private View | Thursday 20 February 6-8pm
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Native American artist Mario Martinez’s first solo exhibition outside of the US. In paintings dating from the 1990s to 2024, the artist honours his Yaqui identity, bringing pre-colonial tradition into dialogue with canonical figures from the landscape of modernist art. Martinez’s painting style bears formal parallels to highly charged, gestural works by Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, both of whom have been touchstones on his journey towards abstraction.
While figuration is more commonly associated with indigenous practices, Martinez’s visual language is free from strict representation, conjuring instead a range of associative images that honour the earth’s bounty, from the branches of trees to expansive sky. Harnessing a spirituality innate to the Yaqui people, Martinez creates compositions that affirm his deep reverence for nature and ancestral territories. In Serpent Landscape II (1993-1994) the artist traces sinuous ridgelines in a landform, which transform before the viewer’s eyes into serpent-like creatures, symbolising the evolution and animation of the natural world.
Martinez moved to New York in 2002. Many of his paintings explore his adopted home, as in a series of works from 2023 which portray the frenetic, ever-changing nature of the city in a tangle of tumbling forms. While works such as Flying (1997) bring the viewer into a spiritual realm – the gecko at its centre insinuating a dream world that connects the viewer with both heaven and earth – Martinez’s Brooklyn series propels us into the heart of the city, with grounding elements evocative of machinery or subway tracks. Yet in amongst this exploration of New York’s topography are references to pre-Colombian Yaqui forms and patterns, all executed in a palette of turquoise, ochre and black, demonstrating Martinez’s ongoing engagement with his heritage and Southwestern origins.
Mario Martinez (b. 1953 Scottsdale, AZ) lives and works in New York, NY. Martinez was born in the Yaqui settlement of Penjamo village and is an enrolled member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. He received his BFA from the School of Art, Arizona State University in 1979, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. Martinez is currently included in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, as well as The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum. Since 1991, Martinez’s work has appeared in almost 50 solo and group exhibitions at prestigious venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, CO (1998); Montclair Art Museum, NJ (2018–2020); and Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN (2015-2016, 2017-2018). In 2005, he was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Native Arts Research Fellowship, (1998, National Museum of the American Indian); an Artist in Residence Fellowship (2001–2002, National Museum of the American Indian); a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL Grant (2013–2014); a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2014–2015); and the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2017, New York Foundation for the Arts). Martinez’s work is featured in the collections of numerous museums and institutions across the country, such as the Museum of Contemporary Native American Art, Santa Fe, NM; Eiteljorg Museum, IN; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, IL; and the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ, among others.