Artists

Eddie Martinez

Press release

Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, is pleased to present Purple Flopper, a solo exhibition by Eddie Martinez. This is the artist's second exhibition with the gallery and his first in the Paris space. Titled after a painting from 2025, Purple Flopper brings together a group of new paintings and sculptures created over the past year. Moving fluidly across abstract and figurative motifs, Martinez's practice is grounded in drawing, encapsulating a longstanding dialogue between spontaneity and deliberation. Central to Martinez's work is the dynamic tension between patience and immediacy. Drawing embodies the impatient side of his practice: it allows him to capture ideas quickly and directly, often serving as the initial spark for larger works. Painting, by contrast, demands a slower, layered approach, which the artist consciously embraces. Nowhere is this more evident than his ongoing body of 'Whiteout' works, initiated in 2015. For this series, Martinez covers his colourful paintings with white paint in a process of erasure that engages with the canon of art history. In paintings such as Delicates, 2025, Martinez makes his process visible as he yields to the physical realities of his material: leaving surfaces to dry before new layers can emerge, time itself becomes an active collaborator. Building on the 'Whiteout' works, Martinez has recently begun a new series of 'Blackout' paintings, following a decade of exploring erasure and visibility via overlays of black in his drawings. The first work from this series – presented opposite the large window of the gallery's jewel-box space at 46 rue du Temple – can be viewed from the street outside, as well as up close. Emerging from its black background, a monumental bouquet of flowers stands out dramatically. The paintings presented in the exhibition continue and expand on several of Martinez's ongoing series, including his 'Flower Pots' and 'Buflys', initiated in the early 2000s and 2021 respectively. Rather than repeating established motifs, Martinez treats these paintings as open frameworks that can be pushed in new directions. In Purple Flopper, 2025, a milky purple hue seeps across the composition, emulating the technique used in the 'Whiteout' and 'Blackout' paintings. The artist's works are further developed through evolving spatial arrangements and painterly experimentation. Although Martinez's early figurative drawings have gradually dissolved into abstraction over time, recognisable forms continue to surface. Bouquets, mandalas and tabletops appear as loosely defined outlines that establish what the artist describes as 'a defined space, an arena for things to happen.' The butterfly-like structure of the 'Buflys' – its head, thorax and wings – serves a similar purpose. Named after his then two-year-old son's mispronunciation of the word 'butterfly', the motif carries both personal resonance and formal flexibility. For Martinez, identifiable imagery functions less as a stable symbol than as a vessel for painterly invention. Alongside the paintings, a new series of sculptures extends Martinez's visual language into three dimensions. Martinez bases his sculptures on assemblages of detritus collected near his home. He casts the found objects in bronze and paints them with bright swaths of colour using spray paint, oil and enamel. Here, he presents tabletop-scaled flowerpot sculptures, which nod both to his ongoing series of 'Flower Pot' paintings, as well as to a smaller flowerpot that Martinez used to have on his desk, which he would continuously draw out of habit. Central to the artist's working method is the use of his own past work as a live visual archive. Martinez frequently revisits earlier paintings and drawings, cutting out fragments and repurposing them in new compositions. Through this process, the remnants of earlier works remain active participants in the present moment: they form a tactile, evolving archive that allows Martinez to engage with the textures and gestures of his creative history without forcing them into a fixed narrative. Throughout Purple Flopper, this sense of continuity and transformation becomes palpable. Drawing remains the heartbeat of Martinez's practice, providing both the impulse for new images and the connective tissue linking decades of work. At the same time, the paintings demonstrate a sustained commitment to experimentation, allowing familiar forms to mutate, collide and reappear in unexpected ways. In Martinez's hands, motifs become arenas, archives become raw material, and painting itself becomes a site where intuition, memory and material process converge. Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, Connecticut) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Martinez's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill; Space K, Seoul (both 2024); Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (both 2019); The Bronx Museum, New York (2018); The Drawing Center, New York; and Davis Museum at Wellesley College (both 2017). The artist participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Martinez's works are in the collections of The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanas City; La Colección, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Marciano Collection, Los Angeles; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; RISD Museum, Providence; and Saatchi Gallery, London, among others.