Flâneur
Flâneur, a solo presentation of the work of Victoria Martinez.
Mindy Solomon is thrilled to present the work of New York based artist Victoria Martinez. Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, textile and fiber based media. Her abstract images capture the language of her urban upbringing in Chicago.
“Brick and concrete are rich with memory. As Octavio Paz wrote of the ideology latent in
ancient Mayan and Zapotec artifacts, ‘space is fluid; it is time that has become extension, and
time is solid, a block, a cube.’ My works reactivate the collective memories of the sites they inhabit, an archive latent in the accumulations of paint, language, and stone that compose urban space. I see architecture as a site of mark-making, an archive of gestures that are created by and experienced through the body. I grew up in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago that has been predominantly Latino since the 1960s, when urban revitalization projects displaced people of Mexican descent from other areas of the city.
The streets of Pilsen are rich with murals and graffiti that invokes new encounters with urban space. Opening expansively from my origins in Chicago’s Lower West Side, I create paintings and textile-based works inspired by the urban landscape, and invite new spatial encounters with the walls of galleries and cultural institutions. Using fabric and masonry as substrates, my works are in dialogue with a history of painting and prioritize color. A conversation with the city in which I am living—be it New York, Chicago, or Jersey City —unremittingly enters my work. Dialogue with place also takes the form of a more personal, daily ritual of walking in and observing the city—in its rhythms, erasures, and diurnal reinventions. This embodied research proposes new methodologies, materials, and visual traditions.”
This exhibition will focus on small scale fiber based paintings and singular brick sculptural objects. Vibrating with a lively color palette and inventive surface textures, the installation will bring a dynamic energy to the gallery space.
About Victoria Martinez
Victoria Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who honors her Mexican-American ancestry through textile-based projects including painting and public art. Her work is inspired by ancient sites, architecture, and the urban environment. Martinez has exhibited at venues including the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, IL, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX, and Museo Universitario Del Chopo in Mexico City.
Her work has been supported by The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship at Yale University, the Actos de Confianza Grant through the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC), and a travel grant through the Theaster Gates Rebuild Foundation. She holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2010) and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in Painting and Printmaking (2020). Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and a group exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum.
