Leslie Martinez. The Fault of Formation

About

This fall, MoMA PS1 presents Leslie Martinez’s (b. 1985, McAllen, Texas) first New York museum exhibition. Martinez, who lived in New York City for fifteen years before returning to Texas in 2019, will debut several newly commissioned series of paintings. Using a cosmic palette based on the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) color model, they dye and pleat canvases of pooled paint that incorporate remains from the studio—including rags and dried acrylics. Born in the Rio Grande Valley near the US-Mexico border, Martinez wields an embodied way of painting that explores place and ancestry in relation to labor and the handmade, drawing on formal legacies of abstraction, as well as generational practices of survival and sustenance learned from their family. Both alluring and abject, the works incorporate a no-waste approach with methodologies of rasquachismo, a resourcefulness embraced out of necessity. Presenting their largest body of work to date, the exhibition will include a series of paintings that explores the politics and poetics of the color gray as a boundless state of indeterminacy and possibility.

Leslie Martinez 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). Martinez has participated in residencies at Denniston Hill, Woodbridge (2023); Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Dallas (2020) and Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2019). They are the recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022). Martinez’s work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville.