WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College presents Eddie Martinez: Ants at a Picknic, the contemporary abstract artist’s first solo museum exhibition. The installation includes a suite of seven new large-scale mandala paintings, accompanied by a group of 17 tabletop painted bronze sculptures and large framed drawings on paper, all presented for the first time. The exhibition, on view in the Camilla Chandler and Dorothy Buffum Chandler Gallery and Marjorie and Gerald Bronfman Gallery, runs from September 19 through December 17, 2017.

The exhibition marks a triumphant return of sorts, as Martinez’s exhibition history began in Boston in 2005. He has since shown around the world, with exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Although Davis Museum Director Lisa Fischman had previously purchased two of his monoprints for the Davis, it was not until an art fair in 2014 that she encountered Martinez’s paintings in person. A collaboration with the artist soon followed, and culminates with the exhibition Eddie Martinez: Ants at a Picknic.

“The works in Ants at a Picknic make plain that Martinez has hit his stride,” said Dr. Lisa Fischman, Ruth Gordon Shapiro ’37 Director of the Davis Museum and curator of the exhibition. “The cosmic hooks, the summoning of spirits, the virtuoso line, the command of color and composition—it all adds up to its own kind of brilliance.”

Mandala Paintings
The seven mandala paintings in the exhibition are grand in size—around 9 by 10 feet—wild with color, and rendered in Martinez’s signature style. Martinez’s paintings build from a distinctive process: the artist starts with small drawings in Sharpie, blows them up and translates the “skeleton” in black silk-screen ink onto canvas; he adds color and often affixes drawings and other textural materials to his surfaces. The drawings are an essential “biographical, journalistic tool” in his process, and “make their way into the painting studio and feed the paintings, [where] sometimes they get glued directly to the paintings. Jabbing impasto vies with sleek movements; sweeping washes, scratched passages, and scuffed fills bump around in oil and marine enamel. Martinez also uses spray paint—perhaps the only remaining link to an old graffiti habit—in sure shot gestures.

Referencing the traditional Hindu and Buddhist representational model of the universe, Martinez’s mandala forms contain an artist’s cosmos: eyes are everywhere, along with other signature motifs and moves, and “EM” often appears. The paintings are possessed of an ambitious compositional dynamism, driven by a confidence of hand and by an improvisational skill in putting paint to canvas that far exceeds plotting.

Sculptures
Martinez’s sculptures speak to the paintings and to his obsessive drawing habit. They function as expansions, translating impulses of line, form, and color into three dimensions. The pieces assemble prosaic scrap elements, and read as totally fresh. Martinez has got an innate material and formal capacity to organize unlikely fragments into satisfying, fully resolved wholes.

Drawings
Several large framed drawings in the exhibition put ink, oil paint, acrylic paint, marker, crayon, debris, spray paint, and enamel to paper. More fully realized than the little drawings that provide the bones for his paintings, and yet more spontaneous and loosed from the formalities of grand-scale canvas, the new drawings speak to the pleasures and challenges of scale – of the hand, the gesture, and the approach shaped by the terms of paper itself.

Born in 1977 in Groton, Connecticut, Eddie Martinez lives in Brooklyn, New York. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 2005, at Allston Skirt outside of Boston, and his work has since been featured frequently in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Martinez has been critically lauded and widely collected for his dynamic linear abstraction, exuberant color, and a vocabulary of idiosyncratic reiterating forms. Inspired by a mash-up of visual sources, from fine art to popular culture, his work in every medium—painting, drawing, sculpture, and print—is impossible to mistake.

Martinez has had solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, New York; Peres Projects, Berlin. His work has also been exhibited in various group exhibitions worldwide, in Rome, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Brussels, Mexico City, Lisbon, and Berlin, including exhibitions at The Saatchi Gallery, London and Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. Additionally, Martinez’s work has been featured in ARTnews, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, ARTINFO, ArtReview, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.