THE WILDERNESS
Solo exhibition
Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
March 27 – May 10, 2025
Opening Celebration | Thursday, March 27, 2025, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to announce The Wilderness, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964, Cuba). This marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and follows a year of significant solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (New York), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH). The Wilderness—which explores fragility, endurance, displacement, and longing through an intricate and confrontational interplay between humanity and nature—unfolds across two San Francisco locations: the gallery’s headquarters and a landmarked carriage house directly across the street in the historic heart of Jackson Square.
The Wilderness features a new cycle of nine paintings. The luminously layered, predominantly large-scale canvases embody an emotional quality and evoke an immersive and vast environment. The paintings are also precise in their imagery: doors, wildlife, or portraits of the archetypal artist as an old man anchor the iconic compositions. The works in this exhibition also underscore Martínez Celaya’s ongoing dialogue with the nature of painting itself, and its capacity to create and sustain meaning. Painting, for him, is an act of labor and inquiry, a delicate balance between seeking and surrendering.
Significant to this body of work is—for the first time in Martínez Celaya’s thirty-year career—the recurring motif of “the artist,” portrayed in these paintings not as a heroic figure, but as a reflective consciousness. In the artist’s words, The Wilderness is “the haunting undercurrent and envelope of my life: the territory of Being, mapped by memory and a longing that seeks to close the gap between self, other, and world. The ‘wilderness’ I am addressing here is both outside and inside. It is the wilderness awaiting consciousness as it takes in the world, and it is the unexplored wilderness within ourselves.”
The artist will be in conversation with Professor Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University’s Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Department of Art and Art History, on Wednesday, April 9 at 6 pm, in the exhibition’s 38 Hotaling Place offsite location.