Lot  067 Ravenel Autumn Auction 2020

Ravenel Autumn Auction 2020

Untitled (White Flower Pot)

EDDIE MARTINEZ (American, 1977)

2010

Oil, acrylic, spray and silicone on canvas

152.4 x 121.9 cm

Estimate

TWD 6,000,000-9,000,000

HKD 1,596,000-2,394,000

USD 205,600-308,400

CNY 1,412,000-2,118,000

Sold Price

TWD 24,000,000

HKD 6,521,739

USD 842,105

CNY 5,491,991


Signature

Signed reverse E. MARTINEZ, titled UNTITLED, inscribed OIL, ACRYLIC, SPRAY, SILICONE and dated 2010

+ OVERVIEW

Prized by art institutions in the past three years, Martinez has launched large-scale solo exhibitions at five museums including: Ants at a Picknic at Davis Museum in Massachusetts, Studio Wall at the Drawing Center in New York in 2017, White Outs featuring recent works of sculptures and paintings at Bronx Museum in New York in 2018, and, for 2019, Fast Eddie: New Paintings at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Open Feast solo exhibition at Yuz Museum in Shanghai.

In the early years, collectors of Martinez's works mainly came from the European and American markets. In the last two years, many young collectors in the Asian market have also joined the fray, including well-known Taiwanese singer/composer Jay Chou. Other renowned individual and institutional collectors of Martinez include: Jordan's Abu Ghazaleh, who is well-known in the circle of world intellectual property rights, London insurance company Hiscox, the Saatchi Collection in London, Colección Júmex, which is the most important private contemporary art collector in Latin America, and the Marciano Collection of Los Angeles, USA. Martinez has had some ups and downs in his life. Born in Groton, Connecticut in 1977, he spent his childhood in Brooklyn, New York, and lived in various states while growing up, including Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and California. Afterwards, he returned to Brooklyn, New York to live and work. He is married to famed contemporary artist Sam Moyer. They had a son named Arthur in 2019 after which their joint exhibition in San Francisco was titled.

Martinez held his first solo exhibitions in 2005 when he was 28 years old, at Stockholm, Sweden and in Boston, U.S.A. The subjects of his paintings were figurative people, still life objects, animals, mandalas, and round table tops outlined in thick black lines characteristic of lively cartoon styles. His bold use of lines and colors has won him favorable reviews. In 2010, he began to move away from figurative painting and devoted himself entirely to abstract painting by 2012. 2013 was a critical period for him as he made attempts at sculptural art, turning his explorations of lines, composition and colors into 3D format. Combinations of daily objects are cast into bronze pieces and endowed life with colors, conducting an exploration of material culture in the process of assembly and composition.

In 2015, he began to experiment with silk-screening, which allowed enlargement of sketch drawings and production of rich imageries. His Love Letter Series in 2016 was like an enlarged version of a notebook with texts and drawings that created a sense of intimacy. Meanwhile, the avant-garde White Outs exhibition in 2018 was boldly covered in white, or an elimination of colors and images to achieve the implication of destruction. In the eyes of the artist, removal and erasure are not the objectives, but an indispensable part of composition, a type of new painting element and concept representing a major turning point of his creative career. His Home Work series exhibited online in 2020 includes small-size works reflective of the period of closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The subjects of Martinez's paintings are quite straightforward, often representing his situation in life at the moment, with bold lines and colors while conveying sensuality as well as a sense of romantic innocence.

Since the early stage of his career, Eddie Martinez has always loved to paint potted flowers. From complex to simple, Martinez’s paintings walk us through his life experience and state of maturity at different ages. The painting to be auctioned titled Untitled (White Flower Pot) was created in 2010, which was a critical period when the artist transitioned from a figurative to abstract style. The painting features a blank background with 2D cartoon-like doodles of exaggerated proportions of flowers and leaves filtered through black contours and childlike brushwork, which exude extreme confidence.

On changing from figurative to abstract painting Martinez says: "I really have to go into the paintings a little bit more to figure them out, to pull their potential out of them. Because I don't necessarily know what the imagery is and I don't know what the moves are going to be as readily as I did when painting a bouquet of flowers over and overand over again." (Excerpt from Ravenel quarterly No. 32)
Related Info

Select: Modern & Contemporary Art

Ravenel Autumn Auction 2020

Saturday, December 5, 2020, 3:30pm