Eddie Martinez

As with his paintings, the sculptures of Eddie Martinez are dynamic, colourful and bold explorations of abstract shape, line and form. In this, the rst comprehensive survey of the artist’s sculptural works to date, the eclectic range of materials he employs comes to the fore, with lo- and found materials such as plaster, cardboard, wood, plastic and rubber (not to mention lobster traps, buoys and badminton rackets) reaching their apotheosis in exquisitely cast bronzes. Playful, energetic and exuberant, they are simultaneously lled with an equal sense of melancholy, nostalgia and humility.

With a distinctive formal and aesthetic unity across his sculptural practice, the works offer an elegiac exposé of physical matter, consumption, entropy and decay today, highlighting myriad raw materials, industrial and artisanal production and manufacturing processes, and their resultant surfaces, textures and other qualities both when new and as they age and degrade. Referencing twentieth-century sculptural traditions such as assemblage, Arte Povera and the readymade, Martinez brings together modernist discourses of primitivism and the handmade with post-modern, post-industrial debates about material culture and mass production in a global economy.

The publication, which features more than one hundred works made since 2013, includes a newly commissioned essay by Dr. Jon Wood, Research Curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England, and has been published to coincide with a presentation of major new bronze sculptures by the artist for Frieze London 2016.