Victoria Martinez
Region: MFA Annual
With a background in public art, Victoria Martinez erects paintings and large-scale installations that produce similarly direct conversations with architecture. Her colorful constructions combine the durability of metal, enamel, and cement with the suppleness of textiles and the fluidity of paint. Contesting fabric’s traditional associations with craft and the decorative, she transforms swaths of cloth into structural elements. Each fragment becomes a building block of a larger assemblage that dynamically weaves in and out of space. Attentive to the histories of place, she also creates portable works that bear indexical relationships with locations. During her travels through Mexico in the summer of 2019 and the spring of 2020, she made rubbings of the pre-Columbian pyramids at Monte Albán and Teotihuacán. Building tangible connections with her familial heritage, Martinez investigates sites as repositories of cultural memory.