Patricia Low is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new work by LA-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya at Patricia Low Contemporary, Venice, the artist's first with the gallery. Titled Here To Kneel, Voyagers, the show brings together nine works integrating nuanced observations of transitory experiences with enduring, universal concerns, such as redemption, memory, time, myth, and nature. The paintings on view bring together complete and incomplete parts, where painted figurative details and images of nature coexist with sketchily drawn seas, architectural references, words, or lines of poetry. The show's poetic title, with its invocation to surrender, conveys the particular vulnerability and sense of humility that attends displacement, whether from one's home, one's culture, or oneself in the present moment. It also references, along with certain symbols and allusions found in the works—a lion, water—the show's location in Venice, a city synonymous with seafaring and transit. Long a touchstone in Martínez Celaya's work, the sea features in these new works in the form of boats, a conch, and coral fronds turned into candelabras. Coinciding with the 60th Venice Biennale Foreigners Everywhere, Martínez Celaya's exhibition explores the notion of foreignness as a psychic as well as physical state.
Painted on canvas drop cloths, linen, and paper, the works continue the artist's long-held quest to reconcile word and image, where fragmentary forms and lines of poetry have equal footing. In each, the ground is drawn in charcoal and sealed, and these grounds collide rather than cooperate with the painted elements. Text may or may not be visible, but each is conceived as a visual poem. In one of the paintings, The Leading Light, from 2024, a charcoal seascape is seen through a clutch of outsize yellow flowers, a bird seemingly perched on one of their stems. An enigmatic line of text that may or may not allude to the artist's native Cuba—'You and I are disappearing but plantains are holding on'—is partially obscured by a radiant star, the script faded in parts like the frayed edges of a memory. In another, The Vocation, also 2024, a segmented lion occupies most of the canvas, its constituent parts placed at slightly skewed angles, behind which are the knotted branches of a tree in charcoal. Floating among these elements is a collection of colourful geometric shapes that gesture, forlornly, towards a sense of order and which occur in several other paintings. Elsewhere, figures appear painted or in shadowy charcoal, variously holding symbolic items, or pictured in ambiguous situations. In his conflicting, captivating fragments, Martínez Celaya relays the extraordinary conditions of a reality whose brightness in the moment renders it simultaneously unreal.
Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Havana) lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as an MS in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BS in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University. Between 1976 and 1979 he was a painter's apprentice. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. Notable projects and exhibitions include the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Museo Marino Marini, Florence, the Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, among many others. His work is held in 60 public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In April 2024, Martínez Celaya opened The Word-Shimmering Sea at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, an immersive interaction with Diego Velázquez's painting Portrait of a Little Girl (ca. 1638–42), which is on view through to July 14th 2024. In June 2024, he opened The Grief of Almost at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is on view through April 6th 2025.
The Cuban-born artist and polymath’s works explore timely, timeless subjects of exile and belonging in oneiric visions of figures and landscapes. Maps, scraps of text, and wraithlike creatures variously feature in his paintings, which call to mind mental as much as physical landscapes. Recent works have focused on the sea, with outsize flowers floating in the foreground. Evocative of a childhood memory, in which a floral scent, believed to be an omen, would sometimes permeate the beach town in Cuba where Martínez Celaya‘s grandparents lived, these paintings have a charged symbolism, and a sense of longing, that suffuses all of the artist’s work.
Established in Gstaad, Switzerland in 2005, Patricia Low Contemporary is one of the main destinations for contemporary art in the famed Alpine resort. With 20 years of exhibition practice and having held around 100 shows in Gstaad (the shows in Geneva and St. Moritz outposts not included), Patricia Low has been central to putting it on the contemporary art map.
The focus is primarily on introducing the most prominent international artists to our audience, with an emphasis on the legacies of Neue Wilde, Contemporary German Painting, Young British Art, Contemporary Photography, Post-Feminism, and Pop as well as putting together historic exhibitions featuring works from the secondary market.
Patricia Low has built strong relationships with the international artists she represents or has invited to show in the Swiss Alps, among them established practitioners like Jonathan Meese, Katharina Sieverding, Herbert Brandl, Peter Halley and Gilbert & George as well as rising artists like Richard Kennedy, Anouk Lamm Anouk and Brian Rochefort.
On April 1st, 2023, Patricia Low Venezia has opened its doors on Canale Grande with a solo exhibition by L.A. based artist Amy Bessone. Ideally situated in Dorsoduro, Venice’s museum quartier, the XVI century palazzo is adjacent to Ca Rezzonico and directly across Palazzo Grassi. Becoming part of the fabric of this city feels like a privilege to Patricia and opens a new chapter for her gallery.
