Enrique Martínez Celaya: Cuba

This volume brings together three major exhibitions by Enrique Martínez Celaya dedicated to Cuba: Los muertos llaman al alba, The Word-Shimmering Sea, and The Sextant. Conceived across Havana, New York, and Los Angeles, these installations offer a sustained reflection on exile and the possibility of return. The work moves from the imagined terrain of memory to the symbolic distance of the sea, culminating in the reconstruction of the artist’s childhood home in sugar. Drawing on personal history and cultural memory, Martínez Celaya uses painting, sculpture, and installation to examine displacement and belonging. These works engage with the emotional weight of Cuba while resisting fixed narratives, proposing instead a space where memory remains fragmented. Across these projects, the artist explores how identity is shaped through absence, rupture, and the persistence of longing. ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA (*1964) was born in Cuba and raised in Spain and Puerto Rico. He has realized exhibitions, interventions, and social and intellectual interactions worldwide with major museums, galleries, and institutions, including the Berliner Philharmonie, the State Hermitage Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. A painter, sculptor, and writer, he lives in Los Angeles.