Martín Ramírez

Last year, more than 120 of Martín Ramírez’s works on paper were salvaged from the Dunievitz family garage in Auburn, California—remarkable given that his known output prior to the discovery was approximately 300 drawings and collages. Deceased doctor Max Dunievitz had secured supplies for Ramírez at the DeWitt State Hospital, where the virtuoso draughtsman spent the last fifteen years of his life diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. Created between 1960 and the artist’s death in 1963, this new trove makes apparent why Ramírez is extraordinary among so-called self-taught artists. Compared with the works in the museum’s 2007 retrospective excavating Ramírez’s work, the twenty-five pieces now on view reveal a more aggressive and descriptive approach to color—red lips, purple horses, undulating blue waves—and illuminate developments in the progression of the artist’s obsessively repeated motifs. A series of works transfigures the jinete, or horseman, seen over eighty times throughout Ramírez’s oeuvre, from a pistol-toting soldier to a fantastic herald, armed with an unidentified message and an expanding, sometimes golden, bugle. The caballero is an obvious nod to both the masculine ranchero culture that the Mexican artist abandoned in immigrating to the north and the subsequent accounts of homeland revolution that reached him. Moreover, the latest incarnation of this recurrent character poignantly symbolizes the loss of individual voice, especially considering Ramírez was not fluent in English and by most accounts seldom spoke over his thirty years confined to mental hospitals. A related theme develops: the figure of the artist/scribe at his desk, pictured alternately without eyes and with a crown like Ramírez’s other favorite subject, the exalted Madonna. Significantly, this coda exhibition offers startlingly new insight into how the artist viewed himself and his role as picture-maker and storyteller vis-à-vis a world in which he was systematically relegated to the margins.