Chris Martin

Description

Drawing on inspiration from Buddhism to Amy Winehouse, Chris Martin creates bold abstract works that explore the unknowable psychological tendencies of art. His canvases are characterized by flat-yet-textured planes of saturated color, and will often incorporate found materials and highly personal paper ephemera. Works such as Untitled (2013) demonstrate the influence of Pablo Picasso's collages, and his canvases' strong geometries also elaborate a self-proclaimed attachment to Piet Mondrian. Martin's practice came of age in 1980s New York, which saw the explosion of the East Village art scene, led by Keith Haring. This monograph collects texts by Glenn O'Brien, Nancy Princenthal, Trinie Dalton and Dan Nadel: in detail essays are focused on Chris Martin as a young man in he 1970s (Glenn O'Brien); on Brooklyn in the 1990s and Martin's influence in the 2000s (Dan Nadel); on Chris Martin and the history of New York abstraction (Nancy Princenthal) and on the culture that has informed Chris Martin (Trinie Dalton).

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer. A former senior editor of Art in America, where she remains a contributing editor, she has also written for the New York Times, Parkett, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA art writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Her previous book, Agnes Martin, won 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography.

Labyrinthine paints at times avoke constellations or maps, with glued-in found images serving as quasi-cultural guideposts in an imaginary place that neither claims nor denies its existence.-- "BOMB"