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Expo Chicago Contemporary Art Fair
Exposure Section
Chicago, IL | April 24–27, 2025
Chicago, IL, February 13, 2025 – For the 2025 edition of Expo Chicago Contemporary Art Fair, Bill Arning Exhibitions (BAE) will present Rekindling Sparks, a solo booth of photo-based conceptual works by Philadelphia-based Cuban-American artist Gabriel Martinez. Martinez, who derives his works from queer archives and subcultural erotic histories, has maintained a decades-long professional relationship with Arning, who curated the artist’s first New York project at White Columns in 1995. For Expo Chicago, artist and curator will reconceptualize Sparks in a Dark Room, a significant installation Martinez presented in 2024 at Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum (LA&M). The installation drew parallels between Martinez’s art and life, and the late queer Filipino Chicago-based artist Etienne,whose work forms the core of LA&M’s collection. Martinez’s works, presented in LA&M as part of a freewheeling installation, taped to the wall and tucked into bathrooms, have been reimagined for Expo Chicago in a more museum-ready form.
In the United States, few LGBTQ-specific museums exist. Chicago, where the leather world was invented in the city’s underground club scene, is unique in giving a home to a space like LA&M. The LA&M was created to preserve the legacy of Etienne (Domingo Orejudos), who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991 and whose hyper-erotic murals were beloved sites for queer visitors to the Windy City. Invited to work within the museum’s comprehensive collection of Etienne’s work, Martinez approached the late artist as a maker of queer myths.
Martinez’s technique uses contact printing, disco balls, and lasers to bring forth manifestations of seemingly collective leather dreams. His Sparks in A Dark Room at LA&M celebrated an expansive erotic drive through the employment of his unique photo processes that uses a photographic tricksterism to render the archival images he rephotographs as magical.
Martinez was raised in Miami but has spent his entire professional career in Philadelphia. For over three decades, he has been a teacher of young artists coming out of school and entering the art scene in that city. Alongside visionaries like Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Wolfgang Tillmans, Martinez invites viewers to consider what was lost when the “golden age of promiscuity” ended during the AIDS crisis. Born in 1967, the artist was too young to have experienced the carefree sex depicted in his work. Still, as a gay man in his fifties, Martinez is figuratively revisiting this era with a mix of survivor’s guilt and erotic envy.
About Bill Arning Exhibitions
Bill Arning Exhibitions (BAE), established in 2019, is a contemporary art gallery located in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to presenting challenging and thought-provoking work. With a focus on emerging and mid-career artists, BAE’s program fosters a stimulating dialogue between the universal desire to challenge convention and meaningful engagement with art history. Led by veteran curator Bill Arning, BAE continues his legacy of championing artists who push boundaries and expand the definition of art. For more information, visit www.billarning.com.
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