Chris Martin
"Untitled", 2004
Acrylic and charcoal on paper
Unframed: 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 18 ¾ x 22 ¾ x 1 ½ inches (47.6 x 57.8 x 3.8 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist and Timothy Taylor, © Chris Martin
Photo by Daniel Terna

Selected by Claire Gilman

Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington D.C.) is an American artist who lives and works between Brooklyn and upstate New York. Martin is known for his vibrant, colorful paintings, which alternate between graphic figuration and ambient painterly abstraction. His paintings have been critically acclaimed for their immediacy and aesthetic diversity, fusing autobiographical elements with a wide-ranging visual lexicon equally grounded in playful pop-cultural referents and twentieth-century art history. The artist’s focus on deep, layered colour fields, abstract forms, and gestural brushstrokes can be seen as emerging out of the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, yet his radical use of non-traditional materials —such as craft glitter, collaged commercial photographs, and domestic objects like LPs, tabloid newspapers, and slices of bread—is distinctly individualistic, and lends his pieces both a visceral texture and physical depth. Thematically, his paintings reflect the cycles of his wide range of personal interests, from astrology and rock music to Eastern mystical traditions, postwar European painting, and philosophical texts. Many of Martin’s recent works are inspired by his observations of the pastoral landscape outside his Catskills studio. Martin has been the subject of numerous solo museum presentations over his more than four-decade career, most recently at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.