6 Exciting Designers at the NADA Art Fair

Morgan Meier, CURBED, May 10, 2024
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.