Patrick Martinez
Patrick Martinez maintains a diverse practice that includes mixed media landscape paintings, neon sign pieces, cake paintings, and his Pee Chee series of appropriative works. The landscape paintings are abstractions composed of Los Angeles surface content; e.g. distressed stucco, spray paint, window security bars, vinyl signage, ceramic tile, neon sign elements, and other recognizable materials. These works serve to evoke place and socio-economic position, and further unearth sites of personal, civic and cultural loss. Patrick’s neon sign works are fabricated to mirror street level commercial signage, but are remixed to present words and phrases drawn from literary and oratorical sources. His acrylic on panel Cake paintings memorialize leaders, activists, and thinkers, and the Pee Chee series documents the threats posed to black and brown youth by law enforcement.
Patrick Martinez, (b. 1980 Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, LA Louver, Galerie Lelong & Co., MACLA, the Chinese American Museum and the Euphrat Museum of Art, among others. Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Cornell Fine Art Museum, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others. Patrick was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL, to be completed in 2021. Also in the fall of 2021 Patrick will be the subject of a solo museum exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
STUDENT WORK