Enrique Martínez Celaya’s exhibition Sea, Sky, and Land: Towards a Map of Everything at USC Fisher Museum of Art brings together some thirty large-format paintings and sculptures from 2005 to the present drawn primarily from Southern California collections. Since the beginning of Martínez Celaya’s career, which started in Venice Beach, he has been interested in intellectually and emotionally ambitious work connecting art to philosophy, literature, and science. One of the goals for this exhibition is to show the work of the last seventeen years suggests a map of sorts, and that this artistic, poetic, and intellectual mapping reveals a territory shaped by self, time, memory, meaning, myth, ideations of home, and the world as it is. Another goal of the exhibition is to make clear his practice presumes art is not only a cultural pursuit but an effort to understand the world, ourselves, and our values and choices. Sea, Sky, and Land is about the existential landscape Martinez Celaya is crossing in a search for meaning. Because his philosophical and poetic probing in writings is an integral part of his search and his artistic practice, each of the three galleries at the USC Fisher Museum of Art will have writings by the artist, as well as works of art dedicated to one of the three motifs—sea, sky, and land.
This is Martínez Celaya’s first museum exhibition in Southern California since his museum-wide show at Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach in 2001. Following his installation of Schneebett at the Berliner Philharmonic in 2004, his work has gone through a transformation that is still unfolding. While he has had several museum and gallery exhibitions since then, this will be the first time the entire arc of his work over the last seventeen years will be revealed.
The exhibition, organized by independent curator Susan M. Anderson for USC Fisher Museum of Art, will be accompanied by a 186-page publication with poetry by Mark Irwin, Associate Professor of English, University of Southern California; and XXXX; and essays by Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University; Elizabeth Prelinger, Keyser Family Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History, Georgetown University; and Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager, The Broad.
Cover image:
Breath, 2005
Oil and tar on canvas and mirror
100 x 156 in.
Collection of Martin Brest, Los Angeles, California