New York-based artist Eddie Martinez has been selected to represent the Republic of San Marino at the 2024 Venice Biennale this April. As one of the smallest recognized country's in the world, San Marino is located roughly 40 minutes inland from the city of Rimini on Italy's northeast coast — and home to less than 34,000 residents.
Martinez is best known for his expressive paintings made of aggressive color fields and subtle bug-eyed characters, which he intuitively creates in an attempt to blur the lines of representation. Born in Connecticut and based in Brooklyn, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world, including an ongoing group show currently at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen.
Entitled Nomads, the forthcoming exhibition will be curated by Alison M. Gingeras, in collaboration with the FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea and Paolo Rondelli. Having first worked together back in a 2015 show at BLUM (formerly Blum & Poe), Gingeras believes that Martinez' automatic way of drawing reflects the mental maps of the mind.
In an interview with ARTnews, she explained that "Eddie allows himself, almost forces himself to constantly migrate through different modes of making and different visual languages—whether it be abstraction or figuration, or some sort of hybrid—and that really is legible in the drawings.”
The 2024 Venice Biennale will commence from April 20 to November 24, 2024 and will also include the first time an Indigenous artist will represent both the US and Brazilian pavilions.
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