Magog Space K until June
Eddie Martinez ‘To Be Continue’
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Eddie Martinez (47) is a ‘doodle fanatic.’ If you have blank space, whether it’s a notebook or a napkin, draw something. The doodles he draws whenever he gets the inspiration he encounters in his daily life are brought to life on a huge canvas and are reborn. His masterpieces, which at first glance look like graffiti, are selling like hot cakes at global art fairs such as Art Basel.
The star artist, who became popular overseas in the 2010s and was eagerly collected by domestic collectors, returned to Korea with an exhibition at a museum. Space K Seoul is holding ‘To Be Continued’, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Eddie Martinez, until June 16.
He is one of the young masters who dropped out of art college and taught himself to draw, expanding the world of painting by using popular culture such as comics and movies, as well as his own daily life and his own works, as materials. He held solo exhibitions at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art, the Yuzhi Museum of Art in Shanghai in 2019, and the Bronx Museum of Art in New York in 2018, and was selected as the representative artist of the Republic of San Marino at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artist who recently visited Korea said, “Although I am self-taught, drawing has been a means of escaping reality and a way of communication for me since I was very young.” He added, “I am just a person who draws. “Painting is how I spend my life, and it’s something I enjoy so much.”
This exhibition showcases his world of work that freely moves between figuration and abstraction. Since 2005, about 30 representative works have been put on display. Various motifs inspired by the artist’s daily life, such as butterflies, vases, tennis balls, and blockheads, appear repeatedly over the years. This is a rare opportunity to see a masterpiece embodying his trademark energy and speed at an art museum.
The ‘Mandala’ series, borrowed from the Tibetan Buddhist practice of making a mandala out of sand and then emptying it when completed, the ‘The Deal’ series, based on playing cards, and the ‘Butterfly’ series, inspired by a child’s experience of mispronouncing butterfly. You can see a variety of works including the ‘Bu-fly’ series.
In 2015, he also attempted a new work using ‘silk screen’, one of the printing techniques. This is a method of enlarging a drawing, printing it on canvas with a silk screen, and then coloring it again. Among them, the 6.7m wide masterpiece ‘A Galaxy-like Landscape – View from the Loggia’ (2023), one of the ‘White Out’ series, captures in bright colors the feeling of loss when a pet dog passes away. The artist explained, “I completed a painting in the form of burying my beloved dog in my own comfortable scenery.”
