Eddie Martinez will represent the Republic of San Marino at the Venice Biennale 2024

Eddie Martinez (Gordon Naval Base, Connecticut, 1977) will represent the Republic of San Marino at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia with the project Nomader, curated by Alison M. Gingeras. New works by the American artist conceived specifically for La Fucina del Futuro, home of the San Marino Pavilion, will be presented for this occasion. The Pavilion was designed and built by FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea S.p.a., with the support of the Secretariat of State for Education and Culture and the supervision of Commissioner Paolo Rondelli and Deputy Commissioner Riccardo Varini.

The biography and conceptual underpinnings of Eddie Martinez’s work have a close affinity with Strangers Everywhere, the theme of the 2024 Art Biennale. Indeed, the artist was marked by an itinerant childhood. He then moved with his family from one region of the United States to another, from coast to coast, often more than once a year. The inclination to appropriate fragments of images and themes thus stems from his nomadic background. Traces of the various landscapes he traversed during his youth occasionally appear in his iconography, which accommodates portions of images from an itinerant life, revised and transformed from work to work. Martinez felt perpetually foreign, regardless of where he stayed, until, as an adult, he put down roots in Brooklyn.

The title Nomader summarizes Martinez’s relationship with forms and ideas, moving from drawing to sculpture and painting, from figuration to abstraction and vice versa. This neologism suggests both the theme of nomadism, physical and cultural, and a phonetic play on the American pronunciation that sounds like “no matter.”

Martinez has approached drawing from a young age; drawing gives him a sense of home, comfort and allows him to explore his imagination; in turn, drawing has become the generative engine of his painting and sculpture practices. “Just as the curatorial theme of the Biennial embraces the notion of ’Homo Migrans’-the assumption that to be human means to migrate, to move physically, to change mentally, and to cross cultures and identities-so does the visual universe of Martinez’s work,” reads the text by Alison M. Gingeras. “The artist has allowed his work to migrate formally and conceptually from the legacy of automatic drawing and abstraction practiced by the CoBrA group to his peculiar interpretation of post-Philip Guston comic book figuration, as well as his unusual reinterpretation of various classic art genres such as still lifes and portraiture. His experimental and heterogeneous practice is constantly evolving: he uses different media as if always trying to make his visual language foreign to himself.”

Eddie Martinez is an American painter and sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn. Martinez is best known for his large-scale wall works that incorporate figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing, foregrounding his signature strong graphic mark making. The artist often places his shapes and figures against monochromatic backgrounds to outline and emphasize his bold gestures in making the paintings through a combination of techniques such as oil, enamel, and spray paint, and often include found objects. Martinez also uses these salvaged objects in the construction of three-dimensional works, combining them and casting them in bronze. The resulting sculptures are reminiscent of the exuberant forms that dominate his canvases. Martinez has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, with solo shows at the Drawing Center in New York, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, the Bronx Museum in New York, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and most recently at Space K in Seoul. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Yuz Museum, and The Morgan Library in New York City.

Image: Eddie Martinez, 2024. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Eddie Martinez will represent the Republic of San Marino at the Venice Biennale 2024

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