About Eddie Martinez
Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton, Connecticut) is an American painter whose work moves between abstraction and figuration. He grew up in California, Florida, Texas, and Massachusetts, and briefly attended the Art Institute of Boston before leaving to work from the urban culture and graffiti around him. He moved to Brooklyn in 2004, where he lives and works.
Martinez is known for fast, gestural paintings and drawings built from bold line, layered colour, and cartoon-like forms that sit somewhere between recognisable figures and pure mark-making. He combines oil, enamel, spray paint, silkscreen, and collage, and draws on sources from Neo-Expressionism and CoBrA to Philip Guston. Drawing is central to his practice. Small marker sketches are often enlarged as silkscreens on canvas, a method that carries over naturally into his prints and editions, where the spontaneity of the line stays visible.
His first solo museum exhibition took place at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2017, followed by presentations at The Drawing Center, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai. In 2024 he represented San Marino at the Venice Biennale with Nomader, curated by Alison M. Gingeras. His work is held in public collections including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Saatchi Collection, and Colección Jumex in Mexico City.
Martinez also contributed to the 2016 White Columns Print Portfolio, published by the New York non-profit space, with a screenprint that reflects the black-and-white immediacy of his drawings.
