Recent Paintings features new paintings made by Chris Martin in the Catskill Mountains, New York, where the artist has maintained a lifelong connection. The paintings exemplify Martin's four-decade-long, freethinking approach to the medium. Abstraction, landscape, and collage coexist on equal, if repeatedly negotiated terms, so that taking in the show as a whole renders moot such categorical distinctions. Instead, Martin provides evidence for the overlapping and mutual influence of numerous artistic lineages. On several occasions, gestural and geometric brands of abstraction inhabit the same composition, though in other cases, one or the other of these modes dominates as Martin makes full use of its visual moods and textural possibilities. For instance, the bands of color intersected by zigzagging or diamond forms that have shown up in Martin's work in different guises over the years, and that nod toward hard-edged aesthetics while maintaining a notably soft and surreal pictorial weight, appear here with a particularly crystalline clarity.
Learn more about the artist in Chris Martin: The Eighties, a new catalogue of the artist's 2019 exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and Anton Kern Gallery, New York, available now in our shop.

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