Silverlens New York is pleased to present Pow Martinez: Junk DNA, opening March 6, 2025. For the artist’s first solo presentation in New York, Martinez probes and satirizes the idea of the “American Medieval” with large-scale narrative paintings and intimate portraits featuring his recurring cast of expressionistic and cartoonish characters. Anchored by a large salon-style wall of all-new works, Junk DNA reads like a storybook—or even a family photo album—albeit one that is filled with mutant-like figures and a dystopian sense of desolation.

With a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, and sound, Martinez’s mischievous and playful narrative canvases resemble a beautiful nightmare, blending bold colors with demonic styles. Comparing his practice to “what a nature painter might do in a digital landscape,” Martinez wades through endless YouTube feeds that directly inspire his painterly subjects. Combining the mundanities of everyday life with elements of pop culture, the result is a comically distorted and satirical portrait of American hard- and soft-power in the Philippines, social media, culture, and the art market.

Conceived as a “collection of thoughts,” Martinez’s paintings are a tool through which the artist makes sense of the world and reality around him. In Junk DNA, Martinez focuses his attention on the “American Medieval,” featuring recognizable elements of European medieval art—banquets, fortified towers, and knights on horseback—in a contemporary, playful painterly style. In blending modern-day symbols and titles with antiquated or even prehistoric imagery, Martinez creates a disorienting clash in time and space. Works such as ZOOM MEETING (2022) feature a shirtless figure on a wooden bed in a bare and barren cabin, while perched in front of a laptop on a video call with a God-like character. EVOLUTIONARY FLASH IN THE PAN (2025) features a giant head floating in outer space, wearing futuristic sunglasses and eating the world. HEAD OF STATE (2024), meanwhile, is more recognizably “classical,” depicting a domestic scene in which peasants prepare food in a cauldron. This is no ordinary meal, however, but the preparation of the decapitated head of the king, as gestured to by the work’s title—a modern, comical take on more archetypal depictions of John the Baptist’s beheading, or that of Goliath.

Other paintings make more contemporary references, notably to American pop culture, to speak to the influence of US soft-power in the Philippines: a bodybuilder is seen bench pressing a slim woman in some kind of native dress; an elderly, shirtless gentleman poses with a rifle and basketball; and Oz’s Tin Man is pictured on horseback while yielding an axe. These depictions teeter between humor and horror, at once ridiculous and comical, yet viscerally critiquing the normalization of violence and exploitation. In walking the line between absurdity and poignancy, Martinez powerfully succeeds in lampooning seriousness and worrisome social norms.

Alongside the collection of paintings, Martinez will present a special experimental noise music performance on Saturday, March 8. In addition to his visual art practice, Martinez has a cult following as a noise musician in the Philippines, under the stage name Sewage Worker. At Silverlens New York, he will use a DIY spring instrument, found objects, and synthesizers to concoct a sound performance tied to the exhibition. Martinez will also be available for book signings of the artist’s monograph, edited by curator and critic Tony Godfrey, published by ArtAsiaPacific in 2024.

Between February 20-23, one week prior to the opening of his New York solo exhibition, Martinez will be featured in Silverlens' presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, with a series of outlandish sports-and-outdoors themed portraits cheekily honoring some of California’s favorite pastimes.

Pow Martinez (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) is a Filipino artist known for his expressionistic style of painting, blending bold colors with demonic, mutant-like characters to create cartoonish canvases. Often resembling a beautiful nightmare, Martinez combines the mundanities of everyday life with elements of pop culture, resulting in darkly humorous works depicting society’s overconsumption.

Pow Martinez has exhibited in cities across the world, including Berlin, Dubai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Madrid, Melbourne, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo, among others. His recent solo exhibitions include Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, but don’t swallow, MO_space, Manila (2024); Grandiose Delusions in D Minor, Yusto/Giner, Madrid (2024); Pow Martinez, Silverlens, Manila (2024); Clunker, Silverlens, Manila (2022); Underground Spiritual Unit, Yusto/Giner, Madrid (2022). He has been featured in numerous notable group exhibitions, including Kaon na ta!: A Melding of Visual Flavors, Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, Iloilo (2023); City Prince/sses, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); 50 Years in Hollywood, Pintô International, New York (2019); and bastards of misrepresentation, doing time on Filipino time, Fries Museum, Berlin (2010), and more. In 2010, he received the prestigious Ateneo Art Award for his exhibition 1 Billion Years at West Gallery, Philippines. In addition to his visual art practice, Martinez has a cult following as a noise musician in the Philippines, under the stage name Sewage Worker. In 2024, Martinez released his first monograph, Pow Martinez, written by curator and scholar Tony Godrey and published by ArtAsiaPacific.