Exhibition of the artist of Cuban origin in New York

Cuban artist inaugurates exhibition at the Hispanic Society in New York

The Cuban-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya presents "The Sea of Words: Diego Velázquez/Enrique Martínez Celaya" at the Hispanic Society
NEW YORK.- Reinvent yourself to survive. To celebrate its 120 years, the Hispanic Society Museum in New York relies on contemporary artists to highlight its collection of works by the great Spanish masters such as Velázquez, El Greco, Goya and Sorolla.
The Cuban-born artist Enrique Martínez Celaya inaugurated this week this new chapter of this institution created by the philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington in 1904, who then had amassed the largest collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.
The Hispanic Society is dedicated to promoting Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese art.

Martínez Celaya's connections with the museum, free to enter and located in the Hispanic neighborhood of Harlem, come from his childhood.

From his childhood marked by exile, the painter born in 1964 and living in Los Angeles, keeps a first grade school notebook that he covered with a photo of a girl: "She was my friend and confidant because we were the same age," he tells the AFP about the image taken from a magazine, and about the letters he wrote to his exiled father in Spain.
These experiences structure the exhibition The Sea of Words: Diego Velázquez/Enrique Martínez Celaya, which will remain open until July 7, the first in an annual series promoted by the director of the institution, the Frenchman Guillaume Kientz, to put it in the map of the city's museum route. That childhood friend of Martínez Celaya is none other than the Portrait of a Girl by Diego Velázquez, one of the more than a thousand works in the museum's collections, which today presides over its exhibition in front of to his framed school notebook that he made when he was six years old.

It is the first time that this trained physicist has been able to see in person the image that marked his childhood. "I don't even dare look at her," he says, still excited.

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