Lecture by Enrique Martinez Celaya
Date(s): April 21, 2010
Time(s): 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Enrique Martínez Celaya, painter, sculptor and writer, will speak at 5:30 p.m. in the Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. A Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska, the artist will speak "On Painting." A reception will follow the lecture.
In "On Painting," Martínez Celaya offers an in-depth analysis of the structure and nature of painting. He pushes through common assumptions about painting, which see it as a process, a gesture, an object, or image. Helocates painting within the disparity of means and ends and the tension between presence and reference. In this intricate yet elegant argument, Martínez Celaya suggests that painting is a location of the mind, which implicates us inextricably with death and love.Martínez Celaya's practice spans a broad range of media and disciplines. He creates projects for art venues such as the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig and the Miami Art Museum as well as environments not traditionally associated with visual arts such as the Berliner Philharmonie. He has offered lectures on art—often in its relation to literature and ethics—at venues around the world and his essays have appeared in many publications. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Sheldon Museum of Art and others. For his work as an artist, he has received many awards and prizes including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Young Talent Award, the California Community Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, and the Anderson Ranch National Artist Award.
Martínez Celaya is the author of Guide, The Blog and Poems for the Bed, an early book of poetry, and has edited a collection of writings on philosophy, Sketches of Landscape as well as a selection of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. In the fall of 2010, the University of Nebraska Press will publish a collection spanning two decades of his writings, interviews and lectures.
Martínez Celaya began his art training as an apprentice to an academic painter. He studied Applied Physics at Cornell University and supported by a fellowship from the Brookhaven National Laboratory pursued a Ph.D. in Quantum Electronics at the University of California, Berkeley. As a scientist he worked on superconductivity, lasers and laser delivery systems, research for which he was issued an often-cited patent. He left the doctoral program at Berkeley to make art, receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994 and on the same year attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. Martínez Celaya taught as a tenured professor in the faculty of Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University from 1994 to 2003. Martínez Celaya’s studio and imprint, Whale & Star, functions as a contemplative and educational environment concerned with the role art has in life, spirit and community. In 2009 he established the Whale & Star Foundation.
Location: Sheldon
