hgm 12.14 publication

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN

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511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

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THE LIGHT OF TIME

By Julie Baumgardner

It is counterintuitive and contradictory, but opacity affords for lucidity. The painter Heather Gwen Martin certainly knows this. Her latest exhibition is a series, Riding High, an ode to the expression “things may not appear as they seem” without the suspense and menace. Instead, Martin’s new works—oil and acrylic on linen—are a tangible tableau of perception. Ways of seeing embodied in paint. Light, a protagonist in Martin’s paintings, shines through the density.

To point out the impact that light has on a painting practice is to utter a self-evident truth. Painters rely on their eye and other tools to guide perspective and compose their tableaux, and the eye can see because of light. Rods and cones, remember? Color lies on a spectrum that relies on neural activity to distinguish wavelengths. As much as Martin resists the urge to be influenced, just as primal as light is to sight, sunshine, incandescents, shadows—the movement of time–bears the mystery and intrigue of Riding High.

Martin, as a painter and a person, is as gentle and smooth as they come. That translates into her work: Her paintings are powerful and fully charged, but they are not aggressive. Martin’s name should be familiar by now. She’s a painter, born in Canada, who has lived in Southern California since her tween years (Los Angeles for the last twelve). Often associated with California’s Light and Space artists, she studied at University of California San Diego and continued at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the last two decades, she has been showing across the country in top galleries and art fairs, particularly with Miles McEnery since 2019.

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Martin’s color-field abstractions should be recognizable, though they are not just a continuation of any particularly artistic movement. Instead, they are poetic investigations of light and color, not inspired by anything specifically but rather from Martin’s own absorption of the world. That’s not to say that her biography or identity is a component of her work, or that Martin centers herself—the human, the painter, the creator—into the paintings. Instead, these paintings are of light, color and composition; it’s their subject and object.

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However, as ever, there’s more at play. Martin infuses her works with a mood. A different mood in each canvas, and even many moods in one work, captured by color. But to say these are emotional paintings, well, the painter says: “‘Emotions’ is a weird word for me, but I feel like my paintings do carry a lot of emotion or are really from me. They’re my instinct.” Martin’s emotions and instincts course through these works, almost in an entangled dance. But the diffuseness of emotion is wrangled/pulled-in by straight, assured lines of instinct. Instinct is, after all, the inner voice. How can an inner voice be wrong?

At first glance, the painting Dawn Shadows, with its continent of teal stretching across the canvas, with craggy peninsulas laying its position firm, may appear as a mere geometric abstraction. But geometry or math or structure isn’t part of the equation in Martin’s works. Dawn Shadows is a self-contained world, with topography and geography, even if these continents are flat. Nature is not the subject, but it is never far from the osmosed environment absorbed by Martin. When mountains, urban scapes, or specific manifestations of nature find their way into Martin’s works, it is through ignited imagination.

Much is explained when Martin speaks: “I have such strong memories of driving down the highway, especially as a kid, and that sense of time and space is super warped. To see everything and nothing at the same time, like just the flat expanse of the huge sky. Just like a barn and the house being a little speck, and the speed that it comes at you …” Take a look at a work like Linger from this series. Do time and space not bend with the velocity of forward motion in which perspective shifts as the eye moves? Or August Air, whose divergent textures (that rough patch!) and use of

Heather Gwen Martin’s Studio, Los Angeles, CA.

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the color chartreuse conjure the smells and temperatures of a hot summer breeze. The painting may not directly represent what Martin observes and absorbs, but the spirit of what she is conveying lingers.

For Riding High, Martin found herself tethered to the natural environment. “I sometimes joke that I’m solar powered,” she says. While making this series, Martin found a glance out the studio window against the urban backdrop of Los Angeles often served as a sundial of sorts, a city clock where instead of hands and tick-tocks were changing shadows and color tones. Martin was entranced by the tonal shifts and they found their way into her world-building through color.

Colors come from Martin’s gut, and from previous works or ideas that she feels need further exploration. “I really liked noticing the subtle differences from season to season, the way the light changes,” Martin says. “Some people might think, ‘Well, that’s horribly boring,’ but the more I realized that I lean that way, I realized those shifts were always there.”

Martins’ works may be abstract, but they are worlds, tangible terrestrial ones in which color

guides the way. Her colors contain the variation and depth found in living beings; a leaf, after all, is never uniform during its life cycle as it moves from green to yellow or red. Only when no longer living does it become uniformly brown.

Martin’s color blocks may appear to be solid, but appearances can be deceptive. In Cagey, all of the lavender, at first glance, may look the same. But a look closer reveals shifts and gradations of the purple and pink underscoring the paint. This is a series in which opacity is challenged. In Salty, Martin utilizes a lavender-gray that contains so many shifts in tone that the dominant background color is at once the same and completely different. It mirrors Martin’s adoration of the repetitive. She lives by routine; but in that routine no gesture is truly the same. In the words of the Japanese author and poet Kamo no Chōmei wrote: “The flowing river never stops, and yet the water never stays the same.”

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Subtlety rules, and a close look is required. A casual scan will miss the depth. Martin’s works have a generous quality to them. They are also accessible, but that doesn’t mean they’re simple.

Martin’s works echo a quote, a request from the great painter Mark Rothko’s son Christopher: “Materials, methods, even titles were a distraction from our experiential absorption in his art.

Rothko just wanted you to look, to be with his artwork. If he were here today, he would urge you to stop reading the wall label, stop wondering about where he bought his paints … Look at the painting. Look into the painting.” It sounds almost silly, but our eyes, which are accustomed these days to processing images at an extremely rapid rate, might immediately capture what we think we see. But there is, in fact, something more.

“Painting is not about an experience, it is an experience,” said Mark Rothko. Martin would agree.

“I’m interested in energies and how things resonate, and then reverberate in you and how those sorts of energies weave into the paintings, because I’m also interested in the physical responses we have to color and scale that we don’t necessarily control.”

For the series Riding High, Martin changes the rules of her own game. Remember, Martin is building a world as much as she is reflecting our shared one. For this go-around, Martin became fascinated by smallness in scale. Of these seventeen works, three are 12 3/4 by 15 inches, eight are 17 by 20 inches, while six are 30 by 25 1/2 inches. Note that Martin usually works with canvases stretched five to seven feet. The painter remarks that the paintings in this smaller format are “more heavy,” and “clever,” but she also views their scale in relation to her body. Her big works “are my height,” while a smaller one “feels sort of like it’s taking this part of my body, my torso.”

When Martin says her smaller works are “heavy,” it’s in part because of the density of spatial relationships. Martin is quick to point out that her paintings, regardless of size, retain the same aspect ratio. With the smaller paintings, though, the closeness of the forms amps up the torrent of activity within her compositions. There’s not as much room for light and opacity to dance (or duel). This time, light shines.

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As painting goes, the size of the canvas often gives us a window into a practice. “At the end of the day, I’m sort of dealing with blobs and lines and the space of a canvas,” Martin says. Yet, “the root is sort of like figuring out who we are or how we exist or what we’re living for.”

So what are we living for? A devilish demand to ask of Martin’s mini-worlds. Thinking back to Rothko, he once said his works contained “a luminescent glow from within, not the light of the world.” The irony there, of course, is that his luminescence did contain the light of the world—the light that shines within all of us. Martin’s roadmaps of color, light, and environment are actually a beacon of stability. Hers is a natural world. “I like to work barefoot with the window open,” Martin says. A painter, in her most natural state, complete.

Julie Baumgardner

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Arrival, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

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Assertion, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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August Air, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Cagey, 2023 Oil on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Chance Encounter, 2023 Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Dawn Shadows, 2023 Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Delicate Balance, 2023 Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Electric Fall, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 12 3/4 x 15 inches 32.4 x 38.1 cm

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Featherweight, 2023 Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Field Coffee, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

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Glint, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

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Interlope, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

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Linger, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 17 x 20 inches 43.2 x 50.8 cm

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Salty, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

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Snatch, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 12 3/4 x 15 1/4 inches 32.4 x 38.7 cm

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Spry, 2023

Oil and acrylic on linen 12 3/4 x 15 inches 32.4 x 38.1 cm

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4 O’Clock Cowboy, 2023 Oil and acrylic on linen 30 x 25 1/2 inches 76.2 x 64.8 cm

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN Born in Saskatoon, Canada in 1977 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA EDUCATION 2001 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1999 BA, University of California, San Diego, CA SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2008 “Transpositional,” Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA 2005 “Paintings,” Lombardo Studios Gallery, Culver City, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2023 “The Flower Show,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

2022 “Verse,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2022 “New Work,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Abstraction Not Abstraction,” PRJCTLA, Los Angeles, CA “The Lyrical Moment: Modern and Contemporary Abstraction by Helen Frankenthaler and Heather Gwen Martin” (curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné), University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL

2021 “Nerve Lines and Fever Dreams,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

2021 “Flying Colors,” Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH

2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

2020 “By Way of Laughter and Trembling,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA “45 at 45: L.A. Louver Celebrates 45 Years with 45 Artists,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

2023 “Riding High,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

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2010 “Recreational Systems,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

2017 “Currents,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2016 L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Landing,” Murals of La Jolla, La Jolla, CA 2014 “Rogue Wave Projects: Heather Gwen Martin,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA 2013 “Pattern Math,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

2018 “Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century” (curated by Mark Scala), Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; traveled to the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA “The Agency of Art,” University Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA “Intersecting at the Edge: Karl Benjamin, Heather Gwen Martin, and Eric Zammitt,” Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, Claremont, CA “Evolver,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Shaping Color,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

2017 “On the Road: American Abstraction,” David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI “California Connections: Selections from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego” (curated by Anthony Graham), California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA 2016 “How Many Miles to Babylon: Recent Paintings from Los Angeles and New York,” C24 Gallery, New York, NY “Atmospheric Abstraction,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA “Touch” (curated by Edward Goldman), El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo, CA 2015 “Younger Than George,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “View from the Edge of the Soul,” Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, CA 2014 “NOW-ISM: Abstraction Today,” Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH “Object Object!!,” Helmuth Projects, San Diego, CA “MAS Attack 6,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2013 “Rogue Wave 2013,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA “Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Theatrical Dynamics,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “MAS Attack,” LA Mart, Los Angeles, CA 2012 “The Very Large Array: San Diego/Tijuana Artists in the Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA “Painting on Edge II,” d.e.n contemporary, Los Angeles, CA 2011 “Lucky 13: Benefitting the Rice University Art Gallery,” MKG Art Management, Houston, TX “Welcome to Anywhere: Southern California Abstraction,” Southwestern College Art Gallery, Chula Vista, CA 2010 “Here Not There: San Diego Art Now” (curated by Lucía Sanromán), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA

“Seven Person Show,” Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Santa Monica, CA “New Contemporaries III,” Project X Art, Solana Beach, CA 2009 “Social Climbing: On the Move,” Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA “Homing In,” Quint Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA 2008 “Transpositional,” Luis De Jesus Seminal Projects, San Diego, CA 2005 “Bare Walls,” Gallery II, Chicago, IL Galleria Ninapi, Ravenna, Italy 2004 “OMA Regional 3,” Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA 2003 “Understood,” Cassius King Gallery, San Diego, CA “Emergent Stages,” Lyceum, San Diego, CA 2001 “Exhibitions and Time Arts Events,” Gallery II, Chicago, IL 2000 Project Cathedral, San Diego, CA SELECT COLLECTIONS Equinor Art Collection, Houston, TX Hallmark Art Collection, Kansas City, MO Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN RIDING HIGH

14 December 2023 – 3 February 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2023 Julie Baumgardner Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY Catalogue layout by Spevack Loeb, New York, NY ISBN: 979-8-3507-2328-1 Cover: Dawn Shadows, (detail), 2023

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