Born in 1977, Groton Naval Base, Connecticut
Lives and works in New York, NY
Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez draws inspiration from a wide-range of sources, spanning from popular culture to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Martinez‘s work joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways. Imbued with a sense of personal iconography, his practice often combines signature figurative elements, such as bug-eyed humans and eclectic headgear with gestural, abstract blocks of color. Energetic and raw, his paintings employ an aggressive use of color and texture with various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint and collage elements on canvas.
Eddie Martinez has gained widespread recognition, having held solo exhibitions at major institutions such as the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; The Bronx Museum, and The Drawing Center, both New York, among others. The artist will present a body of new works in his upcoming solo exhibition at The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York in 2024.
Martinez‘s works are currently on view in the presentation of the permanent collection at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid and in The Cuteness Factor at the Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest. Further institutional group exhibitions include Eddie Martinez & Sam Moyer, Landcraft Garden Foundation, Mattituck; Recent Acquisitions 2002-2022, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Sleeping Procession, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Chichester; New York Painting, Kunstmuseum Bonn; Body Language, The Saatchi Gallery, London; Draw, Museo de la Cuidad de México, and many others.
His works are represented in public collections such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; the Saatchi Collection and Hiscox Collection, London; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Marciano Collection, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; and the Davis Museum, Wellesley.