CHRIS MARTIN: STARING AT THE SUN Introduction by Gregor Jansen, with texts by Elodie Evers, Lars Bang Larsen, Alexander Koch, Bob Nickas and Chris Martin

Walther König, 2012, First edition, 152 pp., 8" X 10 1/2", Hardcover

As new (still in publisher's shrink wrap)

This is the first comprehensive publication on the work of Chris Martin (born 1954), one of America’s finest contemporary abstract painters. Martin’s enormous, sunny canvases are enthusiastic in execution, heroic in scale while also expressing something of the rogue spirit of outsider art. Many of them are dedicated to such artists and musicians as Harry Smith, Frank Moore and James Brown, whose names are inscribed in coarse strokes upon the works. Martin’s paintings are underlain with such everyday detritus as stuck-on coins, vinyl records, banana skins, newspaper articles and slices of bread. Despite such rough, utterly profane surfaces, it is a spiritual tradition of abstraction that Martin’s work draws from: Native American folklore, religious mysticism, anthroposophist symbolism, the landscape painting of North American romanticism--and the great melting pot of New York City itself, where Martin has lived since 1975.