ON VIEW: MARCH 20 - MAY 2, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION & ANNUAL WINTER PARTY: FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 6 - 9 PM
Born in 1895 in rural Jalisco, Mexico, Martín Ramírez spent the last three decades of his life confined in California state psychiatric institutions, diagnosed with schizophrenia and largely cut off from his family and community. Within this enforced isolation he developed a visual language that is both stubbornly private and powerfully communicative: arches, tunnels, colonnades, riders, trains, boats, and lone figures suspended in dense fields of pattern. The drawings in this exhibition transform those motifs into a sustained, almost wordless conversation between enclosure and passage, stillness and movement, memory and the outside world.
If Ramírez was “silent” in institutional records, his work insists that silence is not the absence of dialogue but another register of address. Corridors narrow and widen, bands and vaults repeat with slight variation, and figures sit or ride within tightly framed architectures that both shelter and constrain them. Scrap papers glued into larger supports, seams, and limited materials become structural beats in compositions that hum with vibration and rhythm. Rather than treating his imagery as symptom or purely private vision, the exhibition highlights its structural intelligence—how repetition, constraint, and improvisation converge into a complex meditation on migration, devotion, and what it means to inhabit the world from within imposed limits.
-
-
Untitled (Man at Desk), ca. 1960 - 63Gouache and graphite on pieced paper32 x 18.5 in. (81.3 x 47.0 cm)(MR 075)$ 85,000 -
Untitled (Arches), ca. 1960 - 63Gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on paper22 1/2 x 20 in. (57.1 x 50.8 cm)(MR 071)$ 80,000
-
Untitled (Horse and Rider), ca. 1960-63Gouache and graphite on pieced paper21.5 x 20 in. (54.6 x 50.8 cm)(MR 073)$ 75,000
-
Untitled (Black and White Pattern with Woman in Pink Dress), ca. 1950-55Graphite and tempera on paper24 x 17.5 in. (61.0 x 44.5 cm)(NU 12x.334)$ 80,000
-
Untitled (Colorful Armored Horse with Rider), ca. 1960-63Mixed media on paper22.3 x 23.5 in. (56.6 x 59.7 cm)(MR 053)$ 60,000
-
Untitled (Landscape with Horse and Rider), ca. 1960-63Gouache and graphite on pieced paper24.5 x 11 in. (62.2 x 27.9 cm)(MR 102)$ 45,000
-
Untitled (Blue Horse and Rider), ca. 1960-63Gouache, colored pencil anf graphite on pieced paper15.5 x 20 in. (39.4 x 50.8 cm.)(MR 118)$ 38,000
-
Untitled (Arches), ca. 1960 - 63Gouache and graphite on pieced paper16.5 x 21.5 in. (41.9 x 54.6 cm)(MR 003)$ 70,000
-
Untitled (Horse and Rider with Bugle and Flag), ca. 1960-63Gouache, colored pencil and graphite on pieced paper18 x 23.5 in. (45.7 x 59.7 cm)(MR 044)$ 65,000
-
Untitled (Man Riding Donkey), ca. 1960-63Gouache, colored pencil and graphite on paper22 x 19 1/2 in. (55.9 x 49.5 cm)(MR 095)$ 80,000
-
Untitled (Colonnade), ca. 1960 - 63Gouache, colored pencil and graphite on pieced paper11 x 16 1/2 in. (27.9 x 41.9 cm)(MR 032)$ 20,000
-
Untitled (Black and White Standing Man), c. 1950-55graphite, tempera and crayon on paper24 x 17.5 in. (61.0 x 44.5 cm)(NU 188.310)$ 65,000
-
-
Concurrently on view in Gallery Two:
Domingo Guccione (1898 – 1966): Rhapsody in Red
Visit the online viewing room here.
