Eddie Martinez is having a moment, and it seems so long overdue. The painter has long been a burgeoning artist in contemporary painting, with successful solo shows and wide-acclaim. And yet over the last two weeks, something feels heightened: with a solo show opening at Perrotin in Hong Kong this week, Eddie Martinez also opened FAST EDDIE, a museum show of 17 new paintings now on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.


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From the museum:  Eddie Martinez: Fast Eddie is a solo exhibition of the Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez (American, born 1977), organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit executive director Elysia Borowy-Reeder in close collaboration with the artist. Featuring over 17 new paintings, this solo exhibition will occupy two gallery spaces showcasing never-before-seen paintings. Martinez’s masterful abstract compositions include the artist’s signature motif of floating heads and gestural sweeping paint strokes. Spanning from popular urban culture to action painting, automatism, and Surrealism, Martinez’s work joins together painting and drawing, abstraction and representation in non-traditional ways. Permeated with a sense of personal iconography, his practice often combines signature figurative elements, such as bug-eyed humans and eclectic headgear with gestural, abstract blocks of color. Energetic and raw, his paintings employ an aggressive use of color and texture with various combinations of oil, enamel, spray paint, and collage elements on canvas.