"Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Wilderness" March 27 - May 10, 2025

"The Wilderness" features new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Cuba). This marks the artist’s first exhibition with Gallery Wendi Norris and follows a year of significant solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (New York), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH).

"The Wilderness"—which explores fragility, endurance, displacement, and longing through an intricate and confrontational interplay between humanity and nature—unfolds across two San Francisco locations: the gallery’s headquarters and a landmarked carriage house directly across the street in the historic heart of Jackson Square.

"The Wilderness" features a new cycle of nine paintings. The luminously layered, predominantly large-scale canvases embody an emotional quality and evoke an immersive and vast environment. The paintings are also precise in their imagery: doors, wildlife, or portraits of the archetypal artist as an old man anchor the iconic compositions. The works in this exhibition also underscore Martínez Celaya’s ongoing dialogue with the nature of painting itself, and its capacity to create and sustain meaning. Painting, for him, is an act of labor and inquiry, a delicate balance between seeking and surrendering.

Images:

Gallery Wendi Norris, photo by Glen Cheriton

Enrique Martínez Celaya in his studio, Los Angeles, 2024. Courtesy of artist.

Portrait of Enrique Martínez Celaya by Kwaku Alston; Portrait of Alexander Nemerov by Suszi Lurie McFadden.