Enrique Martínez Celaya is a contemporary American painter, sculptor, author and former scientist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world. He trained and worked as a physicist, completing all coursework for his doctorate, before devoting himself full-time to his artwork. He holds master's degrees in physics and fine arts and has authored books on art and philosophy as well as scientific articles. He is currently a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and the Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC.
Martínez Celaya uses familiar and accessible images such as a boy, a girl, a unicorn, birds, deer, a dog, a sunrise or a seascape pursue a deeper order of experience that lies beneath appearances and beyond our intellectual grasp that resembles moments of childhood astonishment and wonder at the world's radiance. His work draws from the prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Herman Melville, and Lev Tolstoy; the poetry of Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, Harry Martinson, and José Saramago; the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger, Hegel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; the paintings of Velasquez, Caspar David Friedrich, and Ferdinand Hodler; Kurt Schwitters's Hanover Merzbau; the social practice of Joseph Beuys and Paulo Freire; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky; and the music of Bach. About his interest in literature, Martínez Celaya states, “Reading is a primary source for my work." I read philosophy and literature and that is the universe I see my work in, even though I'm a visual artist.... Often when artists talk about writers, they're talking about them as source of content. I'm reading them for a moral stance in the world.” Martinez Celaya writes a popular blog on his website, with a selection of entries published as The Blog: Bad Time for Poetry. The University of Nebraska Press published a twenty-year survey of his writings in 2011, entitled Collected Writings and Interviews, 1990-2010; and Martínez Celaya published a selection of lecture notes from his popular workshops, entitled On Art and Mindfulness, in collaboration with the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado. Martínez Celaya founded Whale and Star in 1998, an imprint that specializes in art and its relationship to other intellectual and creative fields, especially literature, philosophy, and critical theory. The University of Nebraska Press serves as Whale and Star's primary distributor.
Academic positions
Martínez Celaya is currently Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC in Los Angeles and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He was the Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth. He was Visiting Presidential Professor in the history of art at University of Nebraska, and an assistant professor of art at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University,. In 2010, Martínez Celaya inaugurated The Lecture Project, funded with assistance from the Knight Foundation. The original programming presented lectures from academics and art critics until late 2012. In 2019, in collaboration with USC Dornsife The Lecture Project was re-launched and is currently hosting programming from Martínez Celaya's Los Angeles Studio.
Martínez Celaya married Alexandra Williams in 1999. They have four children together. They later divorced in 2015. Martínez Celaya lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
