Leslie Martinez:
The Fault of Formation
MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens
November 16, 2023 - April 8, 2024
Untitled. 2021
Acrylic, fabric, paper, fine ballast, pumice,
and iron oxide on canvas.
Image courtesy MoMA PS1
Photo: Kris Graves
The Decorum of this Body. 2023
Acrylic, painting rags, studio clothes,
dried paint chips, charcoal, coarse sawdust,
pumice on canvas, 60 × 75 × 8″ (152 × 191 × 20 cm)
Courtesy Commonwealth and Council.
Photo: Paul Salveson
The Foam of a Violent Shake (Don’t Tread on Me) (detail). 2023
Acrylic, used studio rags, canvas scraps, used studio clothing,
hand towel margins, plastic film stuffing, paper fragments,
crushed charcoal, saw dust, pumice, paint chips, modeling paste,
wood ashes, mica flakes, mica powder, and iron oxide on canvas.
Image courtesy MoMA PS1.
Photo: Kris Graves
MoMA PS1 presents the first New York museum exhibition of artist LESLIE MARTINEZ (b. 1985, McAllen, Texas). the presentation debuts new and recent works by Martinez, who lived in New York City for fifteen years before returning to Texas in 2019. The exhibition showcases a selection of paintings that range in scale and burst with color, alongside a new series that explores the politics and poetics of the color gray as a boundless state of possibility.
Using a cosmic palette based on the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) color model, Leslie Martinez dyes and pleats canvases of pooled paint, an approach that explores place and ancestry in relation to the handmade and draws on formal legacies of abstraction. Born in the Rio Grande Valley near the US-Mexico border, Leslie Martinez wields an embodied way of painting that resists colonial notions of “good taste” and instead embraces the concept of rasquachismo, a resourcefulness embraced out of necessity. Leslie Martinez builds on and celebrates generational practices of survival and sustenance learned from their family—who have lived in Texas for generations and worked as farmers, ranchers, seamstresses, and construction workers—by implicating their labor and pride in craft through corporeal paintings brimming with gestural mark making.
Both alluring and abject, the works incorporate remains from the studio—including rags and dried acrylics—combining a no-waste approach with methodologies of rasquachismo. Transforming common and often discarded objects into dynamic compositions, Leslie Martinez’s paintings reject disposability and invoke a politics of care—one that embraces histories of painting, labor, queerness, and refusal—defying borders and categorization.
Out of the Gap Where Darkness Echos, Mustangs Took Off Running (detail). 2023.
Acrylic, sumi ink, modeling paste, used studio rags, canvas scraps,
used studio clothing, plastic film stuffing, polyester sewing threads,
paper fragments, mop head fibers, paint chips, buckwheat hull, iron silicate,
pumice, and glass beads on canvas.
Image courtesy MoMA PS1.
Photo: Kris Graves
The Reconstitution of Rejected and Refracted Voids (detail). 2023.
Acrylic, sumi ink, used studio rags, canvas scraps,
used studio clothing, plastic film stuffing, polyester sewing threads,
paper fragments, mylar balloons, iron silicate, iridescent cellophane,
crushed charcoal, paint chips, saw dust, pumice, modeling paste,
mica flakes, mica powder, and iron oxide on canvas.
Image courtesy MoMA PS1.
Photo: Kris Graves
Photo: Tony Krash
LESLIE MARTINEZ (b. 1985, McAllen, Texas) received an MFA from Yale University in 2018 and a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. They have had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023), Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023) and And Now, Dallas (2021, 2020). Leslie Martinez has participated in residencies at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson (2019) and is a recipient of the United States Latinx Art Forum’s Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022). Their work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville.
The exhibition is organized by Elena Ketelsen González, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
