Eddie Martinez to Represent the Republic of San Marino at the 60th Edition of La Biennale di Venezia
Eddie Martinez has been selected to represent the Republic of San Marino at La Biennale di Venezia this spring. Titled Nomader, the pavilion is curated by Alison M. Gingeras and will feature new paintings along with sculptures, and drawings.
San Marino has a history of inviting artists of various nationalities to represent their pavilion in past editions of the Biennale, a gesture that pays homage to the Republic's legacy of providing refuge to foreign nationals.
The conceptual underpinnings of Martinez’s work echo the Biennale's main curatorial theme, Foreigners Everywhere, and resonate with San Marino’s history of embracing outsiders. As a painter, Martinez has allowed his work to formally and conceptually migrate from the legacy of automatic drawing, and abstraction as practiced by the CoBrA group to his distinctive take on post-Philip Guston cartoony figuration as well as his unusual revisitation of various art-historical genres such as still lifes and portraiture. His experimental, nomadic practice is ever-changing, deploying different media—oil, enamel, spray paint, collage, found objects, and more—as if he were always trying to make his visual language foreign to himself.
Eddie Martinez: Nomader will be on view at the Pavilion of the Republic of San Marino from 20 April through 24 November 2024. The San Marino Pavilion is organized by FR Istituto d'Arte Contemporanea S.p.a.
Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer based in New York and Warsaw. Gingeras has served as curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Currently, she serves as an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary and a guest curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami in addition to working independently. Known for her scholarly yet anarchic approach to art history, Gingeras organized several groundbreaking exhibitions, such as Dear Painter, Paint Me: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002) and co-curated Pop Life at the Tate Modern (2009). Most recently, she curated My Name Is Maryan at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2023). Her writing regularly appears in such periodicals as Artforum, Playboy, Tate Etc., Spike, as well as in scores of books and exhibition catalogues.
FR Istituto d’Arte Contemporanea S.p.a., company was founded in 2006 in San Marino by Roberto Felicetti, Vincenzo Rotondo and Alessandro Bianchini. It comprises the FR Art Collection, FR Watch Collection and FR Art Events brands. The activity is characterised by both consultancy projects within the Italian art market and the organisation of exhibitions dedicated to the main artists of the historical Italian 20th century and the international scene. Among the exhibitions: Beyond Form. Mostra sul Novecento Storico Italiano (Palazzo Granieri della Roccia, Turin), La fine dell’avanguardia da De Chirico a Guttuso, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi (San Marino Art Gallery, Palazzo Arzilli), Pablo Atchugarry’s solo exhibition at the Waterfront in Porto Cervo. FR Istituto d'Arte Contemporanea S.p.a. is confirmed in its role as organiser of the San Marino Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024 after the positive feedback obtained on the occasion of the 59th International Art Exhibition (Metamorphic Posthuman, Palazzo Donà Dalle Rose, 2022) and the 18th International Architecture Exhibition (Guest Host, La Fucina del Futuro, 2023).
