Flâneur, a solo presentation of the work of Victoria Martinez.

Mindy Solomon is thrilled to present the work of New York based artist Victoria Martinez. Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, textile and fiber based media. Her abstract images capture the language of her urban upbringing in Chicago.

“Brick and concrete are rich with memory. As Octavio Paz wrote of the ideology latent in ancient Mayan and Zapotec artifacts, ‘space is fluid; it is time that has become extension, and time is solid, a block, a cube.’ My works reactivate the collective memories of the sites they inhabit, an archive latent in the accumulations of paint, language, and stone that compose urban space. I see architecture as a site of mark-making, an archive of gestures that are created by and experienced through the body. I grew up in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago that has been predominantly Latino since the 1960s, when urban revitalization projects displaced people of Mexican descent from other areas of the city.

The streets of Pilsen are rich with murals and graffiti that invokes new encounters with urban space. Opening expansively from my origins in Chicago’s Lower West Side, I create paintings and textile-based works inspired by the urban landscape, and invite new spatial encounters with the walls of galleries and cultural institutions. Using fabric and masonry as substrates, my works are in dialogue with a history of painting and prioritize color. A conversation with the city in which I am living—be it New York, Chicago, or Jersey City —unremittingly enters my work. Dialogue with place also takes the form of a more personal, daily ritual of walking in and observing the city—in its rhythms, erasures, and diurnal reinventions. This embodied research proposes new methodologies, materials, and visual traditions.”

This exhibition will focus on small scale fiber based paintings and singular brick sculptural objects. Vibrating with a lively color palette and inventive surface textures, the installation will bring a dynamic energy to the gallery space.