Enrique Martinez Celaya

Schneebett (Snow-bed) 2003-4
Mixed media installation
Collection Miami Art Museum, promised gift of Dieter and Si Rosenkranz

Schneebett is a two-room installation inspired by Beethoven's convalescence and death in Vienna, Austria, in 1827.  The installation was first created for the Berliner Philharmonie, in 2004, where it accompanied a program of Beethoven works. In one room is a refrigerated bronze bed, its surface covered in a thick layer of frost. Behind it is a large tar-and-feather painting of a snowy wood. The entry to the room is blocked by a pile of birch logs and branches. On the other side of the blocked doorway is an antechamber, equipped with a solitary chair from which a viewer can peer into the inaccessible "bedroom."  The piece is the culmination of an extended period of work that resulted from Martínez Celaya's research into Beethoven's life and work. The artist modeled the metal bed on drawings of Beethoven's death-bed and the room is an imaginative recreation of the room in which Beethoven spent the final weeks of his life in convalescence. The painting at the back of the room, which acts as a metaphorical window out into another world, is inspired by a passage from a Beethoven song cycle which includes the words "to the pensive wood I am driven." This restrained but dramatic artwork explores the elusive terrain between the present and the past, life and death, being and nothingness.

Enrique Martí­nez Celaya was born in Palos, Cuba in 1964. His family fled Cuba in 1972, moving first to Spain and then to Puerto Rico. He earned his BS from Cornell University, an MS in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu (2001); The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2003); Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art (2004); The Oakland Museum (2005); and the Museum der bildenden Kunste, Leipzig (2006). He is represented by several galleries, including LA Louver Gallery in Venice, CA; John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York and Akira Ikeda Gallery, Berlin. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.