News Release - Huntington Launches New Partnership with Artist Enrique Martínez Celaya Including Installation of Three Works

A painting will go on view Jan. 23; two outdoor sculptures go on view Jan. 30

SAN MARINO, Calif.— Two bronze sculptures and a painting by contemporary Cuban-American artist Enrique Martínez Celaya (b. 1964) will be installed at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens this month. All three works are on loan to The Huntington and mark the start of a multiyear visual arts partnership with Martínez Celaya. The sculptures, The Gambler (a life-size depiction of a boy on crutches carrying a house on his shoulders) and The Landmark (a six-foot-high human head positioned on its side) will join other bronzes in a garden adjacent to the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art on Jan. 30. The painting, The Crown, a fairy tale-like image of a boy in a forest, will be installed in the Huntington Art Gallery on Jan. 23.

As a visual arts fellow, Martínez Celaya—who is also an author, poet, philosopher, physicist, and Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at USC—will work among The Huntington's vast history, literary, art, and botanical collections to produce a new work or program for visitors.

"I am thrilled to be able to welcome Enrique and his works to The Huntington," said Christina Nielsen, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections. "Working simultaneously as an artist and a scholar, Martínez Celaya is ideally suited to collaborate with us here—a place that features galleries of important works of art, sponsors humanities research, and whose collections speak to such topics as identity, history, memory, and nature that resonate with his work."

Martínez Celaya was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He began his formal training at the age of 12 as an apprentice to a painter and developed what was to become an enduring interest in writing and philosophy in the turbulent Puerto Rican cultural and political environment of the 1970s. He studied physics at Cornell University and received his master's degree in quantum electronics from the University of California, Berkeley. "My artistic practice incorporates literature, philosophy, and science as well as art theory and history," he said. "So, of course I love The Huntington. I'm honored and delighted to have been given the opportunity to work with the collections there."

Catherine Hess, The Huntington's chief curator of European art, who coordinated the arrangement with Martínez Celaya, said, "The content of Enrique's figural work is moving and poetic. I think the three extraordinary works coming here will present imagery and messages that will be accessible in new ways to our audiences. I can't wait to see what he produces during his time here."

Martínez Celaya has said his work is concerned with the "existential condition of belonging." With , he portrays a young boy carrying the idea of home and identity with him, committed to bringing it with him into the future. The weight of the sense of home appears significant—the boy stoops to carry it with the support of crutches—but he also shows the necessary conviction and resolve to keep it with him and carry it forward. "The memory of 'home' and the idea of 'belonging' is something we all endeavor to carry with us," Hess said. "The elements of this sculpture—schoolboy clothing and home—are meant to be non-specific in terms of place and time, and so, are universal."