Chris Martin with Raymond Foye

Painter Chris Martin and writer and Rail editor Raymond Foye discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.

Chris Martin is a contemporary American abstract painter. His wide range of material and imagery is drawn from Buddhist mandalas, the landscapes of the Catskills, and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Martin’s works attempt to deal with the psychological internalizations of spirituality and memory, using formalism in a way similar to both Alfred Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski. The artist regularly incorporates unconventional materials into his work, such as textiles, glitter, and vinyl records, as evidenced in Sweet Dreams (2nd Pillow Painting) (2009), a canvas where six affixed pillows are covered in bight neon paint.

Born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Yale University. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a 2002 Guggenheim fellowship, 1999 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and two National Endowment for Arts fellowships. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Martin’s works are in the collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. (Source)

In the Rail:

• Chris Martin in Conversation with Craig Olson February 2008
• Chris Martin by Alan Gilbert, April 2018
• Chris Martin; “Unified Field of Unexpected Radiance” by Phong Bui, November 2014
• Bill Jensen in Conversation with Chris Martin February 2007
• Chris Martin Works on Paper by John Yau, March 2009
• Katherine Bradford in Conversation with Chris Martin and Peter Acheson May 2007
• Chris Martin by John Yau, October 2005

Chris Martin is also a contributor of the Rail. See all contributions.

Raymond Foye is a writer, curator, editor and publisher, based in New York City. He has worked for City Lights Books, New Directions, and Petersburg Press, and from 1986-1996 he was the editor and publisher (with Francesco Clemente) of Hanuman Books. From 1990-95 he worked as director of exhibitions and publications at Gagosian Gallery in New York. His recent projects include The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (co-edited with Tate Swindell) for New Directions (2019). He organized the first exhibition of the works of legendary underground filmmaker and painter Jordan Belson for Matthew Marks Gallery in 2019, and is working on a comprehensive monograph on Belson’s work. Currently he is preparing an edition of Gregory Corso’s last poems (1980-2000) for New Directions, and the Collected Poems of Rene Ricard, to be published in 2020.

Raymond is a Consulting Editor of the Brooklyn Rail. See all contributions.

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.