Chris Martin

It is our great pleasure to announce the representation and first exhibition of New York painter Chris Martin at Anton Kern Gallery. His first show will consist of a selection of new paintings created over the past summer in upstate New York. These works, as the writer Bob Nickas describes them in the accompanying book, present "sun-dried paintings and glitter in the rain."

Martin, whose career spans over three decades, continues to create bold, glittering paintings, each animated by undulating forms, radiating landscapes, and electric hues. Despite their immediate spectacle and immense scale (he connects canvases together to produce several of these larger works), the paintings exude a human grounded-ness that seems to stem directly from Martin’s connection to nature, rock & roll, street art, and a dedication to material experimentation.

Nothing and everything is sacred: Martin’s abstract forms offer a sense of mystical clairvoyance condensed into the profane, or vice versa. The paintings present a mesmerizing collision of formal geometries and diagram-like grids with cut-outs of dead pop stars, flashy cars, old records buried under layers of paint, and large amounts of holographic glitter (produced specifically for showgirls in Las Vegas). Consequently, Chris Martin’s paintings prove to be masterfully ambidextrous; one is able to fully experience their presence from a great distance or up-close, indoors or outdoors, in a state of spiritual transcendence or casual play.