Timothy Taylor

As with his paintings, the sculptures of Eddie Mar- tinez are dynamic, colourful and bold explorations of abstract shape, line and form. In this, the rst comprehensive survey of the artist’s sculptural works to date, the eclectic range of materials he employs comes to the fore, with lo- and found materials such as plaster, cardboard, wood, plastic and rubber (not to mention lobster traps, buoys and badminton rackets) reaching their apotheosis in exquisitely cast bronzes. Playful, energetic and exuberant, they are simultaneously lled with an equal sense of melancholy, nostalgia and humility.

With a distinctive formal and aesthetic unity across his sculptural practice, the works offer an elegiac exposé of physical matter, consumption, entropy and decay today, highlighting myriad raw materials, industrial and artisanal production and manufacturing processes, and their resultant surfaces, textures and other qualities both when new and as they age and degrade. Referencing twentieth-century sculptural traditions such as assemblage, Arte Povera and the readymade, Martinez brings together modernist discourses of primitivism and the handmade with post-modern, post-industrial debates about material culture and mass production in a global economy.

The publication, which features more than one hundred works made since 2013, includes a newly commissioned essay by Dr. Jon Wood, Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England, and has been published to coincide with a presentation of major new bronze sculptures by the artist for Frieze London 2016.

Eddie Martinez was born in Connecticut, USA, in 1977. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Martinez has had solo exhibitions at Peres Projects, Berlin; Half Gallery, New York; The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn; and ZieherSmith, New York. His work has been included in the group exhibitions New York Painting, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2015); Body Language, The Saatchi Gallery, London (2013–14); New York Minute, Garage Centre For Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011); Not Quite Open for Business, The Hole, New York (2010); and Draw, Museo de la Cuidad de México, Mexico City (2010). Martinez was recently included in New York Close Up, Art 21’s documentary lm series. He has been featured in Modern Painters, The New York Times, Interview Magazine, The New York Sun, The Boston Globe, ArtReview, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.