Enrique Martínez Celaya, 1964, Cuba, one of the artists in:
WINTER IN AMERICA
A Multimedia Group Exhibition, The School/Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook.
The Crown, 2015.
About:
Enrique Martínez Celaya was trained as an artist as well as a physicist. His artistic work examines the complexities and mysteries of individual experience, particularly in its relation to nature and time, and explores the question of authenticity revealed in the friction between personal imperatives, social conditions, and universal circumstances. These examinations often result in comprehensive projects addressing memory, familiarity, attachment, love, death, and longing. Although his thinking is influenced by literature and philosophy, his work regards the subjective experience of everyday life rather than the nature of and trends in cultural practices.
The Beginning, 2015.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally and is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, among others. He is the author of Collected Writings and Interviews 1990-2010 and The Nebraska Lectures, both published by the University of Nebraska Press, The Blog: Bad Time for Poetry, published by Whale & Star Press, October, published by Cinubia, and the artist book Guide, which was later serialized by the magazine Works & Conversations.* As a physicist, Martínez Celaya published scientific papers on superconductivity and lasers, and is the inventor of several laser devices and of an often-cited patent. In 1998, Martínez Celaya founded Whale & Star as an evolving idea of social and intellectual interaction. At present, it has an imprint, maintains a project of public lectures, hosts several working visits each year for poor and at-risk children, keeps a modest residency and intern program, and offers four small scholarships.
The House, 2015.
Martínez Celaya initiated his formal training as an apprentice to a painter at the age of 12, studied Applied & Engineering Physics at Cornell University and Quantum Electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and earned a Master of Fine Arts with the department’s highest distinction from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Martínez Celaya taught as a tenured professor in the faculty of Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University, and was honored as the second Presidential Professor in the history of the University of Nebraska. He is a Trustee of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, as well as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College.
The Tall Gate, 2014.
The Acknowledgment, 2015.
Martínez Celaya lives and works in Los Angeles, California.(text website artist)