Eddie Martinez: Street Energy and American Abstraction

Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez has built a body of work over the last decade which merges the tradition of American abstract painting with the buzzing energy of the street. Until 30 March, Artland Collector Auction No. 2 offers a unique opportunity to acquire some of Eddie Martinez’s works during an exclusively online auction, featuring quality artists and selected modern and contemporary artworks from international private art collectors of the Artland community.

Eddie Martinez’s Influences and Iconography

Born in 1977 in Groton, Connecticut, Eddie Martinez lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, where he creates intense large-scale paintings that fit like a glove in New York City. Influences range from street art to action painting, CoBrA and neo-expressionism. Martinez was interested in painting from an early age, but never completed a formal art education. He is largely self-taught and his subject matter reflects the urban culture and iconography of his surroundings.

Over the years, he has become recognised for his bold lines and handling of colour, dancing between semi-abstraction and distinct figurative elements with a personal visual language. Combining oil, enamel, acrylic, spray paint, marker, pencil and collage, Martinez creates great textural and colour contrasts with urgent brushstrokes, graphic shapes and forms. His works are filled with aggression and energy, all channelled into the artworks by Martinez, who describes the process of making art as follows: “It’s sort of like a boxing ring in here. It’s a very physical process. Maybe I’m a little addicted to that. It’s a real part of my life. It’s a real way for me to work things out outside of just the actual painting.”

Martinez relates to the way Picasso produced an incredible amount of work across various mediums, as well as how he exhausted the same sort of compositions and imagery because he felt they were always variable. Similarly, Martinez often returns to the same images, exploring them again in new periods and contexts. Like the same personal issues and characteristics that keep resurfacing at different points in a human life, several images from Martinez’s personal iconography keep recurring in his paintings over the years. For example, there are his Blockheads, which he started drawing and painting in 2005 and which still appear in his art today. He describes these as a direct response to his obsession with Philip Guston, and also as a result of his visualisation of a face merging into a Picasso skull, disappearing into a Humpty Dumpty brick wall.