Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Fourth Angel, 2010, Oil and wax on canvas, 30 x 24 inches, Private Collection, Ocean Ridge, FL
Enjoy free art, music, food and refreshments at “Chamber Music @ AEIVA,” a free gallery viewing, reception and concert Thursday, March 10, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The UAB College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Music and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts have partnered with the Birmingham Art Music Alliance to present the event, which connects chamber music with the art on exhibit, “Enrique Martínez Celaya: Small Paintings 1974-2015.”
“Chamber Music @ AEIVA” will offer gallery viewing and a reception at 5 p.m., followed by a 30-minute concert at 5:30 p.m., at UAB’s AEIVA, 1221 10th Ave. South. The event is free and open to the public.
The concert will feature UAB Music faculty and Alabama Symphony Orchestra members performing seven world-premiere compositions written by regional composers. On the program for the evening are works by Holland Hopson, Kenneth Kuhn, Adriana Perera, Matthew Scott Phillips, Tom Reiner, Lawren Brianna Ware and Ron Wray.
Performers include Chris Steele, piano; Hillary Tidman, flute; Laura Usiskin, cello; Brad Whitfield, clarinet; and Pei-Ju Wu, violin.
“Enrique Martínez Celaya: Small Paintings 1974-2015” is on exhibition through March 19. Curated by AEIVA Director Lisa Tamiris Becker, the exhibition surveys the works of one of the most enigmatic artists of our time, through a focus on his intimately scaled paintings. The exhibition features more than 45 small paintings, tracing both chronological developments and many of the artist’s long-abiding themes, while also revealing his evolving approach to composition and technique over four decades. In addition to the two galleries of small paintings, the exhibition also features a gallery of five large-scale paintings, providing further insight into his profound body of work and offering additional context to understanding the significance of these small works.
The exhibition reveals many of the artist’s major poetic and painterly concerns through the intimacy of the small-painting format, including his engagement with topics such as memory, loss, exile, coming-of-age, birth, love, longing, the temporal, the horizon, nature and ambiguity, alchemical transformations, and the discovery of guides amid an often paradoxical and uncertain reality, Tamiris Becker says. Martínez Celaya’s work is also concerned with questions of ethics, authenticity and reflections on human failure as well as human accomplishment, with his work seeking to function as a method and means of identifying and breaking through illusory realities amid the enigmatic circumstances he and, by extension, his audience might be facing.