Remembering to Forget
In his second solo show with the gallery opening September 8th titled “Remembering to Forget,” Patrick Martinez contemplates American life nearly two decades into the twenty-first century. Through landscape and portrait painting supported by a new series of neon sign sculptures, Patrick unearths sites of personal, civic and cultural loss. The paintings collectively bear the imprint of excavation, as if from amidst ruins - they suggest an effort by Patrick to resurface the memories of injustice and the memories of lives lived to keep them from fading from view. Victim of police violence Stephon Clark is memorialized in a portrait wherein his visage emerges from torn away layers of paint and stucco. His portrait shares space on the gallery’s main floor with large-scale landscape paintings depicting the advancement of gentrification and its concomitant displacement and loss. If the main floor of the gallery is an elegy for fading American promise, Patrick uses the basement gallery to present a series of inter-related neon sign sculptures that draw from revolutionary slogans and other sources to send messages of resilience and commitment to remain hopeful and alive.
Patrick Martinez earned his BFA with honors from the Art Center College of Design in 2005, and in 2017/2018 was the subject of two solo museum exhibitions and numerous gallery exhibitions. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York and the Netherlands, and he has shown at venues including Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Occidental College, Galerie Lelong (NYC), the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vincent Price Art Museum, Biola University, LA Louver, Showroom MAMA, Providence College Galleries, MACLA, the SUR biennial, the Chinese American Museum and the Euphrat Museum of Art. He has been covered by the Los Angeles Times, KPCC, KCRW, Fusion, Art News, Opening Ceremony Art Blog and Wired, among others. Patrick’s work resides in the collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Pizzuti Collection, the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, the Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others. Patrick will have his NY solo gallery debut in March, 2019 at Ft. Gansevoort in Manhattan. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Selected Works
Installation
