Enrique Martinez Celaya. The Tower of Snow
10 July, 2012 - 30 November, 2012
The Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace

From July 10th to November 30th, 2012, the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace will host Enrique Martinez Celaya’s sculpture, the Tower of Snow. The installation of this project was organized by the Hermitage 20/21 project, an annual program designed to display contemporary sculpture in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Enrique Martinez Celaya was born in 1964 in Havana, Cuba. His family soon moved to Spain, and then to Puerto Rico. It was there than Martinez Celaya began his artistic education. Ever since 1982, when he enrolled in the physics department at Cornell University, the artist has lived and worked in the USA. Although he received a doctorate in physics at the University of California in 1989, Martinez Celaya chose art as his main occupation. His work in painting and sculpture can be found in the world's most important collection; the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and more.

In his work, Martinez Celaya studies time, individuality, memory and image, on both an everyday and a global level. He draws the themes of his art from a huge variety of different courses, including Scandinavian poetry, the Samurai tradition, quantum physics, the emotional mechanisms of kitsch, and classical and European philosophy.

Martinez Celaya is famous not only as an artist, but also as a poet, philosopher and critic. A publishing house he organized releases books on art, poetry, and critical theory.

The sculpture being exhibited in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace, an image of a boy on crutches, carrying a house on his back on a belt that is choking him, a symbol of duality and fragility has appeared more than once in the artist’s work in drawings and paintings. In 2011, this figure was cast in bronze. In the artist’s words, aside from the emigrant theme, the most important thing in his sculpture is "the idea of the loss of the childhood ability to perceive the splendor of the surrounding world and the appearance of spiritual opaqueness, which is always accompanied by disappointment."

The curator of the project is Dmitri Yurievich Ozerkov, head of the Department of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage Museum.