2024 marks a pivotal year for Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay with two major institutional exhibitions opening in the UK at Nottingham Contemporary and Dundee Contemporary Arts, followed by a solo exhibition at GRIMM London, coinciding with Frieze in October 2024.
Born in in Ayacucho, (PE) and based in Amsterdam (NL), Martínez Garay’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, video, and site-specific installation. Her sculptural works most often reference pre-Columbian aesthetics, particularly artefacts from the Incan civilisation. These sculptures are 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 her 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. Martínez Garay re-animates the existing fragments of lost histories, underscoring the connections between that which can be salvaged and continued.
Nottingham Contemporary
25 May – 8 September 2024
Nottingham Contemporary will present the first solo exhibition in an English institution by Claudia Martínez Garay.
This major new commission will take place in Spring 2024, celebrating the artist’s unique perspective and diverse practice with an ambitious site-specific installation in Nottingham Contemporary's largest gallery space.
Dundee Contemporary Arts
23 August - 17 November 2024
This exhibition of new and existing works marks Claudia Martínez Garay’s first major solo exhibition in Scotland.
The two exhibitions will provide an opportunity for the artist to further explore her complex relationship with Peru, reanimating past works alongside new research into collections of historical and archaeological objects from the Americas within UK National collections.
