Claudia Martínez Garay

Claudia Martínez Garay’s work investigates the journey that objects undertake from the moment of their origin, through the progression of contexts and destinations that they inhabit, suggesting that the information accrued in these transitory spaces holds value and power. Martínez Garay looks to the pre-Columbian cultures of South America, with a focus on representing and interpreting the visual language of Incan ceremonial traditions. Geometric forms are pulled from the Incanato, or Incan elite, which are postulated to be symbols ranging from markers of social class to glyphs from unknown writing systems.

Using artifacts and their attributed narratives to investigate their origins and transformations, Martínez Garay presents ceramic objects as an installation in dialogue with these inquiries. Ceramic animals appear on the ground and atop other objects, painted corn sits in bowls with legs and feet, limb like forms attached to metal rods spring out of bricks. Interested in studying the object’s own surface and materiality, she sees the surface of ceramics as a product of the desert landscape – the original space where the objects symbolism is derived from. Each object has its own biography, its own history. While individual works are fragile and symbolic, together they form a collective that is powerful and analytical. The fractured forms signal that these identities that have been obscured through a process of erosion, both metaphorical and literal. Underlying this arrangement is a drive to reanimate the existing fragments of a lost history. Persistent and bittersweet, Martínez Garay’s work analyzes modernity as an inseparable component of colonialism.

Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983 Ayacucho, Peru) studied Printmaking at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru (PE) from 2001 to 2007 and at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (NL) from 2016 to 2017. She is now participating in the 12th Shanghai Bienniale (CN) and has presented solo exhibitions at GRIMM, New York (US); The Peruvian-British Cultural Center (PE); Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Foreign Affair’s Ministry of Peru (PE); and French Alliance Gallery of Miraflores (PE). Her work can be found in the collection of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru (PE); Lima Art Museum (PE); Micromuseo alfondohaysitio (PE); Museo Olho Latino (BR); Hochschild Collection (PE); Graeme Briggs Collection (SG); and several private collections.