With His Largest Solo Show to Date, Patrick Martinez Brings His Changing Hometown of Los Angeles Into Focus

“What America appreciates as a beautiful thing is something totally different to me,” says Patrick Martinez. Known for making ambitious works that fuse neon, painting, and architecture, the multidisciplinary artist refracts familiar scenes of American life through his own colorful prism. “The idea of European easel painting, landscapes even—it’s like, ‘Oh, that's beautiful. How do you flip that on its head?’”

The question of how to tinker with stubborn hierarchies and chronicle contemporary urban life with love and rigor is at the heart of his latest exhibition, “Patrick Martinez: Histories,” which opens today at Dallas Contemporary. The show, which combines new and earlier work, finds Martinez—a Los Angeles native of Mexican, Filipino, and Native American descent—examining his city’s changing landscape against the backdrop of development and gentrification, as well as his own heritage.

“I'm thinking about those small histories that no one's paying attention to,” he says. As the museum’s director Carolina Alvarez-Mathies notes, California and Texas have the largest Latinx populations in the United States, making the Dallas Contemporary an ideal place for Martinez’s exploration of immigrant and BIPOC communities. 

Martinez’s artistic language—one of security bars, cinder blocks, and vivid murals—reflects the city and country he has called home for 44 years. His “Streetscaper” paintings plaster “for sale” posters over faded Mayan murals. His “Pee Chee Folder Project” captures portraits of victims of police brutality on the type of folder he carried in middle school.

The glowing sculpture equality, 2016, references the neon signs omnipresent in LA shop windows and reads: “All Men Are Created Equal,” with the final word conspicuously not illuminated. “The neon, the tile, the stucco, the discounted areas in Los Angeles, the fleeting materials, things that are disappearing—that's always urgent for me to place into the work,” Martinez says.

Martinez’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Broad in LA. Despite his growing profile, he remains focused on his love of the process. “I'm making rich paintings that feel luscious and right, and I think people can really tell,” he says. “When they see it, they're like, ‘He really enjoys what [he does].’”

“Patrick Martinez: Histories" is on view through September 1, 2024 at Dallas Contemporary.