César A. Martínez American, b. 1944

Martínez was born in Laredo, Texas, and graduated from Texas A&I University, Kingsville in 1968. He now lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. A significant figure in the late 1970s and 1980s Chicano Art Movement, Martínez’s portraits are Mexican American art history icons. Deeply rooted in his native South Texas and its Mexican American culture, Martínez’s work reflects a broad knowledge of the Western art canon and finds inspiration from color-field paintings, Mexican architecture, and photography. Martínez offsets his melancholic subjects against a vibrant palette of clothes, in tension against abstract backgrounds. The individuals in Martínez’s works are merely hybrids derived and elaborated from many photographs found in high school yearbooks, obituaries, newspapers, and other public sources. 

The background in his paintings is like an upright wall layered with vibrant colors that are often seen in traditional Mexican architecture as well as in the more modern works of Mexican architects like Luis Barragan and Ricardo Legorreta. In Mexican architecture, as in Martínez’s pieces, the louder the colors, the more powerful the statement. Now, instead of a skyline, the upper horizontal band of color can be seen as an elevated tier of paint functioning architecturally to distinguish the top frieze from the lower main part of the building.  “I’ve never really done art that I would say is political. But I think the kind of art that becomes politicized, as in my case and in many of my contemporaries, is simply because it had a Chicano perspective or Chicano imagery. The Chicano Movement was such an overpowering thing that I couldn’t help but become associated with it. The Chicano Movement was a renaissance in thinking about us and in creating those institutions and images and writings that reflected who we are. They were non-existent at that time, we had nothing to relate to, so we had to make it up as we went along. And that was the road to a deeper understanding of who we are.” – César A. Martínez.

His work has recently been acquired by prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His work is also part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Cheech Center, Riverside, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago, IL.

The artist has been featured and reviewed in Hyperallergic, Art in America, and four times in The New York Times. In 1997 Martínez was a Artpace San Antonio International Artist-in-Residence and in 1999, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX, organized a retrospective of Martinez’s work titled César A. Martínez: A Retrospective and published a catalogue of the exhibition.

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