Max Carlos Martinez @ Christopher Henry Gallery Tonight!

Our illustrious associate director and utterly beloved art world star Max Carlos Martinez is having his first New York commercial gallery solo exhibition in the Lower East Side's Christopher Henry Gallery tonight, 6-9 pm. By all accounts, the place will be rockin'!

I've seen a fair bit of the gorgeous new work in this show, and can't encourage you enough to come enjoy it yourself! Here are the details:

Christopher Henry gallery is pleased to present its first solo show of new work by New York based artist Max Carlos Martinez.

Self-trained artist Martinez explores the iconography of the West in this series of large scale works on paper. Contextualizing the American expansionist dream and its discontents, Martinez pictures Cowboys and Indians, Horses and Maidens, all rendered in saturated tracery. Building on and extrapolating from a wealth of scholastic imagery from the 50s and 60s, Martinez frames ideas of displacement, assimilation, and revenge, balancing a sense of historical despair with hope for a brighter future.

Deeply personal, Martinez’ work is animated by a longstanding tension in his own soul, as an “outsider” trying to find his place in the ever shifting landscape of American ethnic identity. A descendent of a four-hundred year legacy in New Mexico, Martinez finds himself simultaneously assimilated and lost—in his own words, “left with a self that has become foreign.” These works are topographies of that state—pictures of a point in history where the past relinquishes its hold on the future, as seen from the vantage of one stuck in its grip.

Max Carlos Martinez
The Pursuit of Happiness (is a Warm Gun)
Christopher Henry Gallery
127 Elizabeth Street (@ Broome)
212-244-6004
Oct 8 - Nov 1, 2009
Opening: TONIGHT: Thursday, October 8, 6 - 9 PM

Image above: Max Carlos Martinez, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, 2009, acrylic on paper, 30" x 22". © Max Carlos Martinez