Opening Reception for Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Wilderness

The reception is spread across Gallery Wendi Norris’ headquarters at 436 Jackson Street and offsite location down the block at 38 Hotaling Place.

Refreshments will be served.

“Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Wilderness” marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and follows a year of significant solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (New York), the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana), and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH). The Wilderness—which explores fragility, endurance, displacement, and longing through an intricate and confrontational interplay between humanity and nature—unfolds across two San Francisco locations: the gallery’s headquarters and a landmarked carriage house directly across the street in the historic heart of Jackson Square.

The Wilderness features a new cycle of nine paintings. The luminously layered, predominantly large-scale canvases embody an emotional quality and evoke an immersive and vast environment. The paintings are also precise in their imagery: doors, wildlife, or portraits of the archetypal artist as an old man anchor the iconic compositions. The works in this exhibition also underscore Martínez Celaya’s ongoing dialogue with the nature of painting itself, and its capacity to create and sustain meaning. Painting, for him, is an act of labor and inquiry, a delicate balance between seeking and surrendering.