Artist: Mario Martinez

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents Native American artist Mario Martinez’s first solo exhibition outside of the US. In paintings dating from the 1990s to 2025, the artist honours his Yaqui identity, bringing pre-colonial tradition into dialogue with canonical figures from the landscape of modernist art.

Martinez’s painting style bears formal parallels to highly charged, gestural works by Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, both of whom have been touchstones on his journey towards abstraction. While figuration is more commonly associated with indigenous practices, Martinez’s visual language is free from strict representation, conjuring instead a range of associative images that honour the earth’s bounty, from the branches of trees to expansive sky. Harnessing a spirituality innate to the Yaqui people, Martinez creates compositions that affirm his deep reverence for nature.

Mario Martinez (b. 1953 Scottsdale, AZ) lives and works in New York, NY. Martinez was born in the Yaqui settlement of Penjamo village and is an enrolled member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. He received his BFA from the School of Art, Arizona State University in 1979, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985. Martinez is currently included in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, as well as The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum. Since 1991, Martinez’s work has appeared in almost 50 solo and group exhibitions at prestigious venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, CO (1998); Montclair Art Museum, NJ (2018–2020); and Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN (2015-2016, 2017-2018). In 2005, he was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Native Arts Research Fellowship, (1998, National Museum of the American Indian); an Artist in Residence Fellowship (2001–2002, National Museum of the American Indian); a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL Grant (2013–2014); a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2014–2015); and the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2017, New York Foundation for the Arts). Martinez’s work is featured in the collections of numerous museums and institutions across the country, such as the Museum of Contemporary Native American Art, Santa Fe, NM; Eiteljorg Museum, IN; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Chicago); and the Heard Museum (Phoenix), among others.