Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, Connecticut) is an American painter and sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn. Martinez is best known for his large-scale paintings that incorporate figuration and abstraction, painting and drawing, and foreground his signature muscular brushwork. His works often feature a combination of mediums, including oil, enamel, spray paint, and collaged found objects. Martinez also uses these scavenged objects to construct three-dimensional works, which he combines and casts in bronze—resulting in sculptures that recall the exuberant forms of his canvases.

Martinez’s practice draws from a deep understanding of painting’s histories, and his works are dense with allusions to canonical artworks as well as personal references. Many of his works recall CoBrA and action painting, while others signal to the ominously cartoonish late-career work of Philip Guston. During his childhood and adolescence, Martinez moved back and forth between opposite regions of the United States, sometimes uprooted more than once a year. His magpie style of appropriating fragments of imagery emanates from this nomadic background, with traces of the different landscapes traversed during his youth occasionally appearing in his iconography, revisited and transformed from work to work.

Martinez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia (where he represented the Republic of San Marino in an exhibition curated by Alison M. Gingeras); Space K in Seoul, South Korea; the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; The Bronx Museum, New York; the Drawing Center, New York; and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, among others. His works are represented in international public and private collections.

Eddie Martinez is represented by Blum, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Timothy Taylor.

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