MARTÍN RAMÍREZ
1895-1963 (MEXICO)

Biography
Cited by many as the most influential of self-taught American modernists, Martín Ramírez assembled not just one of most significant bodies of material in the 20th century canon, but one of the foremost by any Latin American artist of any era.

This achievement is all the more profound if one considers the context. Ramírez was just one of thousands of illegal refugees, fleeing Mexico to seek employment during the Great Depression. For him, as with so many of his countrymen, the desire to feed a family soon led to homelessness, isolation and institutionalisation. Martín Ramírez was never to see his wife and children again.

Instead, the artist began to draw impossible architectures, swirling landscapes and heroic pioneers. His homeland evolved into an abstracted dreamworld of border crossings, elongated horizons and deconstructed tunnels. Caballeros, male and female, towered over vertiginous hilltops, unable to stop the high-speed trains and vehicles hurtling by. Yet this was a man with no formal art training. The scale and effortless complexity was astonishing.

It was Tarmo Pasto, a local art educator, who brought Ramírez’s interior geographies into cultural society. He encouraged the artist during his lifetime, bringing materials to the humble hospital studio and introduced his draughtsmanship to artists like Wayne Thiebaud and Jim Nutt.

Since then, Ramírez has enjoyed retrospectives at Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (1989) and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), curated by Smithsonian director Lynne Cooke. He is a key artist in Kasper KÖNIG's seminal The Shadow of the Avant-Garde at the Museum Folkwang, Essen (2015) and was also seen at LACMA, LA in 2017.

The Gallery of Everything proudly presented a series of masterworks by this highly regarded art-ist, sourced in collaboration with the Ramírez estate. The inaugural UK exhibition also featured the largest work ever created by the artist, which is intended for museum collections only.