Claudia Martínez Garay Born 1983, Ayacucho (PE)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (NL) and Lima (PE)

Claudia Martínez Garay is a Peruvian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam (NL) and Lima (PE). Martínez Garay's practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, and site-specific installation. As well as interrogating European museum collections and histories, Martínez Garay also takes inspiration from her own Andean heritage, exploring historical images, propaganda, and sounds from her home country. Her sculptural works often reference pre-Columbian knowledge systems and are often combined in larger installations in dialogue with symbolic elements derived from her research.

Martínez Garay is interested in how artefacts, cultural relics, and propaganda communicate the history and social-political memory of cultures. Multiple interpretations of historical figures and artefacts are incorporated into the artist's work, supplanting institutional narratives and notions of stewardship. The artist seeks to challenge the persistence of colonialist frameworks and official narratives informing our understanding of the pre-Columbian cultures. The fractured forms in her work signal stories and identities that have been obscured through a process of erosion, both metaphorical and literal. Martínez Garay reanimates the existing fragments of lost histories, underscoring the connections between that which can be salvaged and continued.

2024 marks a pivotal year for Martínez Garay with two major institutional exhibitions in the UK at Nottingham Contemporary and Dundee Contemporary Arts, followed by a solo exhibition at GRIMM, London in December.

Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983 in Ayacucho, Peru) studied printmaking at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru (PE) and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (NL) from 2016 to 2017.

Solo exhibitions include, Every Seed is Awakened, Dundee Contemporary Arts (UK); Wakchakuna /  We Who Share Everything and Nothing, Nottingham Contemporary (UK) in 2024; Ghost Kingdom, GRIMM, New York, NY (US) and Ayataki, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (US) in 2022; Caminos de Liberación, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in 2021; Ten Thousand Things, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (CN) in 2020.

Selected group exhibitions include, Devenir Tierra, 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima (PE); Sediment Spirit, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (UK); Vessel and Veil, David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL (US); Echoes of Our Stories, Quinta do Quetzal, Vidigueira (PT); The Measure of the World, RADIUS, Delft (NL) in 2023; Cassandra's Complex, basis e.v., Frankfurt (DE); Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art, Denver Art Museum, CO (US); Museum Arnhem, Arnhem (NL) in 2022; No Linear Fucking Time, B.A.K., basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (NL); All Eyes | We are the collection, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Plural Domains, Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL (US); Fragments of Sphere, Project Space on the Inside, Amsterdam (NL) in 2021; 1 Million Roses for Angela Davis, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden (DE); The Faculty of Sensing: Anton Wilhelm Amo, Kunstverein, Braunschweig (DE) in 2020; Imagined Communities, 21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (BR); the 16th Istanbul Biennal titled The Seventh Continent, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Istanbul (TR); Immortality, 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Xiaoyu Weng, Ekaterinburg (RU); Diplomacy at Yeh Art Gallery, St. John's University, Queens, NY (US) in 2019; Taning Y/Our Passion, Aichi Triennial, Aichi (JP) in 2019; Pro-Regress, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, the 12th Shanghai Biennial; and Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York, NY (US) in 2018.

Her work can be found in the collections of AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); AMC Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); Fundación Studie e Richerche Benetton, Treviso (IT); Central Reserve Bank of Peru, Lima (PE); Cisnero Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, FL (US); Denver Art Museum, CO (US); THE EKARD COLLECTION; Hochschild Collection, Lima (PE); KADIST Collection, Paris (FR) and San Francisco, CA (US); KPMG Art Collection, Amsterdam (NL); LAM museum, Lisse (NL); LOOP Collection, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona (ES); Micromuseo al fondo hay sitio, Lima (PE); Museo de Arte de Lima, MALI (PE); Museu Olho Latino, Atibaia (BR); Museum Arnhem (NL); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (CN) among others.