New York gallery Hesse Flatow showed three Amanda Martínez pieces that displayed her ongoing material experimentation with adobe and other New Mexican craft traditions like embroidery and basket-weaving. The repetitive patterns in her stacked and woven pieces are both intriguing and mystifying, a language the artist continues to develop. An off-white stack of complex shapes forms “Antorcha,” a floor sculpture that looks like a pallet of materials one might find on a construction site, except these are made of found polystyrene. On the wall, a piece titled “Working Meditation III” presents a surface that looks it’s composed of bricks but with a plastic sheen to them (and are in fact made out of found polyurethane as well). Another work, “Guía,” is a floor-bound sculpture combining both brick and weaving, as stacked hexagonal shapes sit atop a textured block from which strands of dyed and woven raffia form a rough tapestry on one side. Order and repetition are a theme in Martínez’s work, and she has described this ritualized process as a self-healing practice.
Martínez has presented two solo exhibitions with Hesse Flatow, a New York gallery that focuses on emerging and mid-career artists, and her work has also been presented at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and other galleries around the world.
