MARTÍN RAMÍREZ: LANDSCAPES
October 13 – November 12, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday October 13, 2011, 6-8pm

Ricco/Maresca Gallery is pleased to present Martín Ramírez: Landscapes. This exhibition focuses on perhaps the most complex and mysterious subject matter of the artist’s oeuvre, and includes several powerfully imagined, mural-sized landscapes, which have never been exhibited. Martín Ramírez’s landscapes poignantly illuminate his life as a Mexican American artist suspended between the two very separate worlds of his native, beloved Jalisco, Mexico and the confines of California’s state institution system. Created in the years between 1950 and his death in 1963, these singular drawings merge the artist’s reminiscences of Mexico with his acute experience of alienation in America.

In her 2007 review of the exhibition of Martín Ramírez at the American Folk Art Museum, Roberta Smith, senior art critic at the New York Times, declared Ramírez “one of the greatest artists of the 20th century”.

Ramírez had an indelible style built on a supreme sense of economy and shot through with a mix of sly humour and sunny optimism that coats deeper, darker feelings. He had his own way with materials and colour – buoyed by an unerring sensitivity to the power of blank paper – and a cast of unforgettable characters, including mounted caballeros, levitating madonnas, and deer and dogs on high alert. But most of all Ramírez had his own brand of pictorial space, which he regulated with rhythmic systems of parallel lines, curved and straight. He played spatial illusion as if it were an accordion, expanding and contracting it in a mesmerizing alternation of stasis and movement.
- Roberta Smith, The New York Times, Art Review/ Martín Ramírez, “Outsider In”, Jan. 26, 2007

Martín Ramírez has been the subject of numerous museum shows, including the retrospective Martín Ramírez: Pintor Mexicano, at the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, in 1989, and two major exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum, NYC: a traveling retrospective titled Martín Ramírez in 2007, and Martín Ramírez: The Last Works in 2009. In 2010, the 20th century master was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reína Sofía, in Madrid, titled Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement. Ricco/Maresca Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Martín Ramírez.