Móyòsóré Martins

Móyòsóré Martins (b. 1986) is a mixed-media artist. Raised in Lagos, Nigeria by a Brazilian father and a Nigerian mother from Ekiti state, Martins adopted a paintbrush and pencil at a young age as instruments to express his innately curious and spiritual nature. Through his work, Martins blends his traditional Yoruba cultural roots with his contemporary vision of art.

Martins’s artwork combines figurative, abstract, and narrative elements drawn from his unique life experience and journey from Nigeria to his large Bronx studio. His work is deeply symbolic and frequently features cultural and personal iconography. Martins’s richly textured paintings feature bold brushstrokes, thick oil paint, drawings, scribbles, collaged materials, and text. The vibrant, heavily layered canvases are interspersed with spiritual elements and wishes manifested and fulfilled. Martins also works in three- dimensional form with clay sculpture. As Martins describes:

My artwork is intentionally raw. I like to use a lot of different materials and have rough-cut edges on the canvas. The paintings are textured with scratches, scribbles, and mud-like paint, as well as clay, liquid plastic, oil sticks, chunky layers of oil paint. I layer the background and then deconstruct them, which gives the feeling of wear and tear on the canvas. No painting is alike as each has symbolic patterns and encrypted messages hidden within it. I want to merge the vision with the given and the new world that I live in now. The word “Why?” is seen in a lot of the work because it leaves you asking the same question.

Forbidden by his father to create or study art as a child, Martins spent his college years in Ghana and the Ivory Coast studying computer science. He immigrated to New York City in 2015 to further pursue his artistic ambitions. Martins’s artwork has been exhibited most recently at the Nassau County Museum (Roslyn, NY), Path Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), TrafficArts (New York, NY), Dacia Gallery (New York, NY), Heath Gallery (New York, NY), and Grady Alexis Gallery (New York, NY).