Chris Martin

b. Washington, DC, 1954

Chris Martin is a multidisciplinary artist known for his vibrant, colorful paintings, which alternate between graphic figuration and ambient painterly abstraction. He has experimented with non-art materials – such as craft glitter, collaged commercial photographs, and domestic objects like LPs, tabloid newspapers, and slices of bread— as well as non-traditional installation and extreme scale. Martin’s career is characterized by an evolution of thematic cycles defined by visual lexicon grounded in playful pop-cultural referents as well as twentieth-century art history. His works draw on a wide range of source material, including astrology and rock music to Eastern mystical traditions, postwar European painting, philosophical texts, and the pastoral landscape outside his Catskills studio, resulting in a visceral texture and physical depth. Martin is an influential figure in the artistic community in Brooklyn, New York, where he has been based since the 1980s.

Martin received his Certificate of Art Therapy at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and his BFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Martin's work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA, among other museums. Paintings, a career-spanning monograph, was published by Skira in 2017. Martin lives and works in Brooklyn and the Catskills, NY.