Claudia Martínez Garay
GRIMM is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983, Ayacucho Peru) on view at our London gallery.
The show follows Martínez Garay’s two major institutional exhibitions in the UK in 2024, the first at Nottingham Contemporary and the second at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Martínez Garay is a Peruvian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam (NL) and Lima (PE). Her practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, video, and site-specific installation. Her work is inspired by her own Andean heritage and dwells on Peruvian history through the life of cultural artifacts, visual archives, and the multiple voices and meanings ascribed to these. Combining graphic iconography and abstraction in her paintings and ceramic sculptures, she reflects on the idea of memory, life, and after-life, invoking a strong identification with native American cultures of South America. Focusing on re-reading, remaking, and interpreting the visual traditions, she presents installations in a specific imaginary time and space.
Often interrogating European museum collections, Martínez Garay seeks to challenge the persistence of colonialist frameworks and official narratives informing our understanding of pre-Columbian cultures. Her sculptural works are frequently combined in larger installations in dialogue with symbolic elements derived from her research of Andean history. Underlying these arrangements is a drive to reanimate the fragments of lost and forgotten stories. The fractured forms in her work signal narratives and identities that have been obscured through a process of erosion, both metaphorical and literal. Underscoring the connections between that which can be salvaged and continued, Martínez Garay’s work is persistent and bittersweet, analyzing modernity as an inseparable component of colonialism.
About the artist
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.
Recent 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).
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.
