American, b. 1954
Chris Martin is a contemporary American abstract painter. Born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., he went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Yale University. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a 2002 Guggenheim fellowship, 1999 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and two National Endowment for Arts fellowships.
Working from a heterogeneous array of cultural traditions, Martin makes paintings that serve as living documents of the eternal present. He privileges stylistic diversity and immediacy over predetermined aesthetic ideas, generating an art that can be as primal as it is knowing, as vibrantly joyful as it is meditative and hermetic. He has experimented with non-art materials, non-traditional installation, and extreme scale. For this reason, Martin’s career is characterized by an evolution of thematic cycles rather than strictly linear development. The overt influences—musical, spiritual, and art historical—that appear throughout his work are acknowledgments of his desire to return to a common well, or universally accessible source of inspiration. Martin is a revered and influential figure in the artistic community in Brooklyn, New York, where he has been based since the 1980s.
Working from a heterogeneous array of cultural traditions, Martin makes paintings that serve as living documents of the eternal present. He privileges stylistic diversity and immediacy over predetermined aesthetic ideas, generating an art that can be as primal as it is knowing, as vibrantly joyful as it is meditative and hermetic. He has experimented with non-art materials, non-traditional installation, and extreme scale. For this reason, Martin’s career is characterized by an evolution of thematic cycles rather than strictly linear development. The overt influences—musical, spiritual, and art historical—that appear throughout his work are acknowledgments of his desire to return to a common well, or universally accessible source of inspiration. Martin is a revered and influential figure in the artistic community in Brooklyn, New York, where he has been based since the 1980s.
