Chris Martin (artist)

Chris Martin was born in Washington, DC in 1954.[1] Martin grew up in an old house in Washington DC that was filled with paintings and old family portraits.[2] He loved a life-sized Sir Thomas Lawrence portrait his mother had inherited.[2] His grandmother was a landscape painter.[2] A vivid memory as a child happened at Beauvoir School when he and his classmates made a giant mural of dinosaurs in the refectory.[2] Every year the third graders would repaint this wall.[2] He was thrilled by the act of painting.[2][4] Martin often visited in the Catskills during his youth, which he considers to be a lifelong influence on his art.[2][5][6][7][8]

Chris Martin studied painting at Yale University from 1972 to 1975.[9] After dropping out of Yale’s painting department in the mid-1970s, Martin moved to lower Manhattan.[10] He soaked up the punk energy of the city, living a few blocks from the infamous club CBGB.[10] In 1980 he moved to Williamsburg, where he shared a studio before moving to his current building at the neighborhood’s eastern edge.[10] Although he painted continuously, his professional path was circuitous.[11] He traveled, notably to India, and took typical early-art-career odd jobs (museum guard, art mover).[11] Less typically, he completed a BFA in art therapy at New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1992, and for roughly 15 years worked at an AIDS day treatment program based in Chelsea, which took him to clinics in Harlem, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood.[11][6][7][8]

In the 1970s and 1980s, he created collaborative paintings during Happenings with other artists and musicians.[12] He placed works in bus stops, on the sides of buildings, and in nightclubs, fabricating them with phosphorescent paint to respond to the lighting and conditions of the location.[13] He has taken large-scale paintings for ‘walks’ around the block, involving his neighbors and local shopkeepers in creating the meaning and experience of his work.[4] Martin’s work from 1979-94 is a formative period for the artist during which he developed his own personal lexicon of forms and his intensely worked yet fresh, refined surfaces.[14] Since the 1980s, Chris Martin has been a significant figure on the New York painting scene, notable for his exuberant experimentation with the medium.[15][16][17]

Martin has cited his experience as an art therapist in the 1990s, when he worked with drug and HIV-positive patients, as a catalyst to be braver and more daring as a painter.[18] In more traditional gallery spaces, Martin has blurred the distinction between the art object and the viewer, placing paintings on floors, ceilings, and displayed among household objects.[4] His first big Manhattan gallery show was at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, in 2008.[11][17]

He makes colorful, abstract paintings, often with elements of collage and text.[19][20] His paintings are casualist and his oeuvre is broad and has encompassed many mediums.[10][6] An early member of the Williamsburg art scene he still maintains the same studio he has had since the mid 1980s, located in what used to be a florist's freezer.[7] Martin maintains studios between studios in Brooklyn and upstate New York.[18][10] Throughout his canvases there are references to both his deep love of the bucolic and rural, and to the urban at its most “street.”[18] Martin’s career is characterized by an evolution of thematic cycles rather than strictly linear development.[21] The feeling of Martin’s paintings is controlled anarchy, which mirrors his artistic development.[10]

Martin is deeply engaged with the history of abstraction.[22] Martin often uses pop cultural references in his paintings, paying homage to his many influences from the fields of literature, film, and music.[23] Influences like Beat Generation literature, psychedelia subculture, and Buddhist meditation were infused with hints of the street art practices of the time.[24] Martin is quick to divulge his paintings’ wide array of references, from spiritual traditions to magic mushrooms to global art history.[10] By making the sources of his inspiration the subject of his work, Martin shares the ‘behind the scenes’ processes of his practice, giving insight to an approach to abstraction which is informed as much by art history as contemporary media.[23]

Graffiti in his neighborhood inspired him to paint with greater immediacy and on a larger scale; he has sometimes left partly finished paintings outside to be exposed to the rain and sun.[25][15] Images are appropriated from newspapers, books, magazines and album covers; slices of bread and vinyl records have been attached to his canvases, which are almost always covered with vibrant colors and, on occasion, large quantities of glitter.[15]

Forms for his work came from a long process of unconscious drawing.[25] Then a desire to see it in paint—a kind of curiosity that motivated him to choose colors, mix up buckets of paint, and prepare a surface.[4] The actual performing of a painting involves giving oneself over to a series of actions and trusting in the body and what the body knows. And when I step back to look at this thing, I’m still trying to figure it out just like everybody else.[4] He “lets the paintings make themselves” and creates bold abstract works that explore the unknowable psychological tendencies of art.[16] Martin references the connective processes of making, placing his topsy-turvy rationale as a field of wonder and contemplation.[23]

His enthusiasm for painting and its history is expressed literally in the work, for predecessors and influences are readily acknowledged; among them are Paul Thek, Alfred Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski.[15] Martin brings together his interest in painters as different and distinct as Forrest Bess, Philip Guston, James Harrison, Myron Stout, and Paul Feeley.[26][22] Some of his works demonstrate the influence of Pablo Picasso's collages, and his canvases' strong geometries also elaborate a self-proclaimed attachment to Piet Mondrian.[16] Martin’s works attempt to deal with the psychological internalizations of spirituality and memory, using formalism in a way similar to both Alfred Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski.[3]

Many of Martin’s works are dedicated to such artists and musicians as Harry Smith, Frank Moore and James Brown, whose names are inscribed in coarse strokes upon the works.[3] His work seems to look back to the Romantic tradition as much as to modernism, to literary figures as disparate as Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, and Samuel Beckett.[18]

Martin’s enormous, sunny canvases are enthusiastic in execution, heroic in scale while also expressing something of the rogue spirit of outsider art.[3] Martin pushes the boundaries between the most sophisticated formalism and outsider art’s instinctive logic.[23]

Music features prominently too, as well as references to popular culture and psychedelia.[15] Martin has described his art as “turning up the volume” of painting and many of his works refer to musicians including Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the “Godfather of Soul” James Brown[22] Martin’s abstract motif can function as a stand in for pictorial narrative, the loud rhythmic pattern conveying the essence and energy of a live concert.[23]

His wide range of material and imagery is drawn from Buddhist mandalas, the landscapes of the Catskills, and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism.[25][3] The overt influences – musical, spiritual, and art historical – that appear throughout his work are acknowledgments of his desire to return to a common well, or universally accessible source of inspiration.[21]

Martin’s paintings are investigations in color, form and texture, ranging from bold and graphic to gestural and expressionistic.[22] His canvases reflect a zany approach to experimentation and a methodological mode of play, conceiving painting as something intrinsically haptic that resolves from an intimately hands-on negotiation of materials.[23] Martin did unorthodox experiments, including making paintings with fire, or in front of an audience, sometimes with dancers and a group of Nigerian drummers, or “while making love with paint on top of canvases—I thought I could make ‘passionate’ paintings.”[11]

Although abstract, Martin’s paintings are a direct response to the physical world around him.[25] Many of his works integrate objects from his immediate environment into their surfaces, including kitchen utensils, records, photographs, and Persian carpets.[4] Embedded in the surface is a 12” LP, its extreme texture and readily identifiable shape create a tactile sensation within the painting, giving the canvas a physical dynamic that extends beyond looking and taps into collective memory and experience.[23]

A hugely prolific and expressive artist, he makes much of the value of mistakes, bad taste and inconsistency.[15] Martin’s work often appears playfully spontaneous, this aesthetic is developed through prolonged reconsideration and reworking of the canvas, with some pieces taking as much as 20 years to finish.[23] Martin’s paintings are sometimes made from remnants sewn together, and the visible seams, combined with happily tolerated wrinkles and sags, lend further urban grit to the sunny atmosphere.[11]

Chris Martin makes abstract painting look effortless.[23] His canvases are characterized by flat-yet-textured planes of saturated color, and will often incorporate found materials and highly personal paper ephemera.[16] Martin’s crude style reflects his concept of painting as speculative ‘concoctions’, their casual and seductive appearance facilitating the appreciation of the intimacy of his practice.[23] He privileges stylistic diversity and immediacy over predetermined aesthetic ideas, generating an art that can be as primal as it is knowing, as vibrantly joyful as it is meditative and hermetic.[25] He has experimented with non-art materials, non-traditional installation, and extreme scale.[21] Some works seem to wear the legacies of the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s lightly, as though the color field had been taken on a mystic detour into the cosmic.[18] His paintings absorb a plethora of conflicting and congruent influences, which seem to play off and against each other.[18]

The paintings may refer in some way to landscape, for example, either the Catskills in New York State or the sunrise over the Ganges River at Varanasi, India.[11] Martin uses an irregular geometry to explore the phenomenon of light reflected on water, a solid constantly changing material structure.[7] One of his recurring subjects is the moment where light becomes liquid, and liquid becomes light, the shattering of each by the other.[26] It is a moment that embodies a state of heightened seeing, as well as an unstable, constantly transforming world.[26]

Chris Martin, Staring Into The Sun, 2003-2006, oil, paper collage, and staples on canvas, 79 x 86 inches (200.1 x 218.4 cm)

Martin’s 6½ -by- 7-foot painting ‘Staring into the Sun,” 2003-06, illustrates the physical and optical experience of his work.[11][8] This painting is composed of undulating vertical forms of greens and reds that descend the canvas and seem to be illuminated from within.[11] The violently opposed green and red bands appear, just as the title warns—blinding.[11]

The painting’s titles are often written along the bottom of his canvas, giving them a diaristic feel.[26] The handwritten words name tutelary spirits.[11] 'Staring into The Sun’ is inscribed at the bottom with ‘Ganges Sunrise Asi Ghat Varanasi’ and conveys the morning sunlight reflecting off the Ganges as the devout enter the holy river to pray.[11][7]

Martin has spoken about his work matter-of-fact, explaining that he has experimented with very tall canvases.[8] The scale shifts that mark so many of Martin’s big paintings can be seen as an example of his effort to reach out to viewers, and Staring into the Sun makes that gesture almost literal, extending a virtual welcome mat.[11]

Historically, landscape and monumental scale have been bound up with the sublime, with Romantic notions of awe and terror.[8] It is one of Martin’s accomplishments to strike that thought, replacing it with the assertion that big, gorgeous landscapes—and drop-dead abstractions, too—are everyday things.[11] As in much of Martin’s work, the final image has a quality of inevitability and is reduced to its essence.[14] His painting refer to landscape and its geometric affinities, bands of bright color shimmering in the background just on the border between abstraction and figuration.[3]

Martin regularly incorporates unconventional materials into his work, such as textiles, glitter, and vinyl records, and even a canvas where six affixed pillows are covered in bright neon paint.[3] All are abstract and have the feel of sacred diagrams by way of pop art and Minimalism.[7] Some are done on paper towel, stilts and banana peels. His psychedelic and mystic leanings surface in titles like Epiphany and Mushroom People.[27][3] His work reflects the attitude of the bricoleur, picking up this and that, setting it aside, then incorporating it into an artwork in an astonishing way.[26]

His most recent canvases, with their glitter and high-octane colors, are clearly an assault on the eye, but more importantly they are an assault on anyone who believes that painting has lost its vitality.[18][10] Martin’s provocations can be seen in the way he uses and confuses materials and subjects, for example when he marries the spectacle of glitter with gestural and trippy representations of plant and fungi forms.[18] Martin’s rugged materiality melds concepts of high art with the everyday, making the case for Persian rugs, cardboard boxes, and Wonder Bread as relevant painting media in assemblages that seem off the cuff. He’s partially borrowing from the instinctive process of outsider art, but the execution is that of a sophisticated formalist.[28]

Martin’s works are known for their extremely physical surfaces which are created by collaging found items onto the canvas.[23] Their surfaces are often distressed or collaged with elements including shellacked Wonder Bread, broken vinyl records and papier mâché forms.[22]

Painted on every conceivable kind of surface, from aluminum foil and corrugated cardboard boxes to cotton batting and artichoke leaves.[11] He has painted on corrugated fiberglass and his shirts. He has used fluorescent paint and insulation foam.[26] Despite such rough, utterly profane surfaces, it is a spiritual tradition of abstraction that Martin’s work draws from: Native American folklore, religious mysticism, anthroposophist symbolism, the landscape painting of North American romanticism.[3]

If his paintings are confrontational it is because they brim with passion—a passion for the materiality of painting certainly, but also a passion for painting as a transcendental act.[18] Martin has said “the new abstract painting says ‘Fuck you we will not stand guard at the tomb of modernism but neither do we feel pressed to deliver the latest titillation.’[11]

Martin is often described as a genuine “artist’s artist”: his works are as much a celebration of creative experiment and discovery as they are exciting resolutions.[23][27] Martin is a revered and influential figure in the artistic community in Brooklyn, New York, where he has been based since the 1980s.[21] Martin has been a kind of indie hero for painters.[6] His omnivorous brand of inventive abstraction, his intense surfaces and the visionary quality of his paintings have made him influential in the New York art world since the early 1980s.[14]

The artist Peter Halley, whom Martin met when they were both students at Yale University, described his works as transgressive, due to their unswerving use of scale, materials and dark Romantic subtext and called him a “cultural guide” in a 1997 essay.[18][11] Critic Bruce Hainley praised what he saw as heroic apostasy in Martin’s work, and urged young artists to submit to its “corrupting” influence.[11] The writer David Levi-Strauss, labeling Martin an “American Brahmin/Bohemian,” hailed his “public service, compassion, spiritual search.”[11]

Martin played with technique, style, and the inclusion of different media—all leading up to his current standing as an artist today.[24] His work is insouciant, at once playful and dead serious.[26] There's joie de vivre and delight in Martin oeuvre.[27]

His work is included in the permanent collections of several museums including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, High Museum of Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• Chris Martin Paintings – by Dan Nadel (Author, Editor), Glenn O'Brien (Author), Nancy Princenthal (Author), Trinie Dalton (Author), Chris Martin (Artist); Publisher : Skira (February 27, 2018), Language : English, Hardcover : 320 pages, ISBN 978-8857234748

• Chris Martin: Staring into the Sun – by Elodie Evers (Author), Lars Bang Larsen (Author), Alexander Koch (Author), Bob Nickas (Author), Gregor Jansen (Introduction), Chris Martin (Artist); Publisher : Walther König, Köln; Bilingual edition (February 29, 2012), Language : English, Hardcover : 152 pages, ISBN 978-3863350918

• Anton Kern Gallery, New York
• David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles