Beijing Gallery Weekend: Chris Martin

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present new paintings by New York-based artist Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington, D.C.) for Gallery Weekend Beijing 2023.

Martin, who has long been interested in Eastern religions, dots these paintings with staccato lines and snake-like imagery that suggest ancient hieroglyphs. Scarlet, emerald-green, and cadmium-yellow paint streak across the painted canvases, a return to the totem imagery and vivid primary-color palette that marked Martin’s early works of the 1980s. This return to early themes is characteristic of Martin’s practice, in which the artist returns to meditate on astrological, musical, or pop-cultural predecessors who have inspired him over the decades, continually reinterpreting these myths in the changing context of his own cultural experience.

In recent paintings, Martin has increasingly explored the radical implications of living in a world dramatically altered by climate change-related disasters, and their powerful effect on the imagination. Collaged photographs of mushrooms and looming painted forests recur through this series, inspired by the vast forests and sunsets of The Catskill Mountains, where the artist lives. The mushrooms suggest the organic cycle of decay and rebirth of living organisms that die and are reabsorbed by the soil.

“I found some consolation in films about the early history of Earth: the extinction of dinosaurs, the cycles of the Ice Age. What interests me is how everything changes,” Martin wrote recently of his meditations on the cycle of nature. “Nature is savage, unrelenting, as fearsome as it is beautiful. Roses can flower at the same time as Covid. Pondering the science has helped me gain the perspective needed to live with the terror, joy, and grief of living today.”