●      Family reunion, excited to see everyone → Fabuloso

●      It’s Sunday night, and you want to start the week on a positive note → Fabuloso

●      Late for rent and might get evicted → Fabuloso

●      Life is not perfect, but we do our best to survive → Fabuloso


With Fabuloso, Jamie Martinez offers a bracing, clear-sighted devotion to the material realities of urban survival, filtering the chaotic spectrum of working-class endurance through a singular, hyper-focused lens. The exhibition takes its title and conceptual anchor from the ubiquitous household cleaner, transforming a cheap, intensely fragrant supermarket staple into a potent symbol of domestic upkeep, ritualistic labor, and emotional armor. The work on view operates in a precarious, deeply moving space between celebration and crisis. In Martinez’s hands, "Fabuloso" becomes a rhythmic, secular mantra for navigating the modern world’s unpredictable terrain. The work possesses a gritty, street-level intelligence that refuses to romanticize hardship, opting instead to catalog the exact, specific textures of getting by.

Formally, the exhibition showcases Martinez’s sophisticated command of industrial materials, deploying a sharp, contemporary vocabulary that balances weightlessness with domestic grit. The inflating and deflating maracas, along with the Flower Lady Pinata, celebrate life and create special ritual gatherings full of personal memories, while the machetes represent much harder, sharper, aggressive labor-oriented work. There are three clay-covered, adorned Fabuloso bottles: one is halfway full, its contents used to clean the west sidewalk of 11th Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets as a gesture of labor. Another blends Fabuloso with synthetic sweat, merging human exertion with detergent. The final bottle remains unused and sealed with clay. Life, as these works remind us, is fundamentally imperfect. Fabuloso stands as a testament to the aesthetic and emotional maneuvers required to simply survive—or, at the very least, to smell good while doing so.

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Jamie Martinez (b. Ibagué, Colombia) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of history, research, indigenous spirituality, and ancient beliefs. Encompassing painting, sculpture, and installation, his work serves as a profound commentary on colonialism, mysticism, labor, and ceremonial gatherings. Martinez’s work has been featured extensively across major media outlets, including Hyperallergic, Artforum (Must See solo show), New York Magazine, The Observer, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and Whitewall Magazine, with broadcast appearances on CNN, Fox News, Good Day New York, NTN24, and Yale University Radio (WYBCX). He has exhibited globally at prominent institutions and galleries, including the Queens Museum (NY), The Glucksman Museum (Ireland), Petzel Gallery, Penn State University, 601Artspace, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons, Ghostmachine Gallery, and Galerie Richard. Notably, he was awarded Best Sculpture for the group show Apollo’s Decathlon at the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art in France. Martinez's artwork is held in numerous permanent and private collections worldwide, including The Marina Tsvetaeva Museum (Moscow), the Gabarrón Foundation (New York and Spain), the Acuity Brands corporate collection, and Foursquare's New York headquarters.