Enrique Martínez Celaya | Museo Marino Marini

Watching and Waiting: Enrique Martínez Celaya Selected Sculpture, 2005–2023
Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy
31 March - 5 June 2023

"The exhibition, curated by Giorgio Verzotti, pays specific attention to the sculpture of Martínez Celaya, almost in dialogue with the works of Marino Marini. For the first time, the artist transforms, for this exhibition, the flickering images of his paintings into concrete objects in bronze, concrete, wax or wood, which share space with the viewer and intensify their personal involvement. Thus sculpture becomes a powerful medium through which Martínez Celaya explores highly personal and intimate concepts that characterize the emotional journey of life, such as memory, loss, vulnerability, fortitude, the ephemeral and hope.

Martínez Celaya's sculptures are presented as fragments of a story or a poem which, in their physicality, occupy the space in which the visitor moves. They seem to be a permanent version of what is usually a fleeting act: crying, sitting down, raising an arm, sheltering. They perform the function of witnesses, intensified by their immobility. Immobility that does not want to be impassive, but rather resistance, determination, waiting and patience, as the title of the exhibition itself underlines, Watching and Waiting.”