Speed Art Museum spotlights Leslie Martinez’s ‘Blazing Bounty’ in collection exhibition

The Speed Art Museum in Louisville is highlighting Leslie Martinez’s ‘Blazing Bounty’ (2023), a large-scale abstract painting on view in ‘Abstraction, Continued: Recent Paintings from the Speed Art Museum Collection,’ which runs from 16 May to 30 August 2026 and so has only its closing days left. The work entered the museum’s collection in 2023 as a gift from Robert Lowinger.

Martinez’s painting extends the formal language associated with Abstract Expressionism through an unusually physical range of materials. ‘Blazing Bounty’ combines fabric and paper scraps, charcoal, fine ballast, pumice and acrylic on canvas, producing a heavily worked surface. The composition measures 96 by 144 by 5 inches (243.8 by 365.8 by 12.7 centimetres).

In its collection highlight, the Speed describes Martinez as an artist who has emerged prominently over the past five years and who brings Abstract Expressionist concerns into the present. Rather than relying solely on paint and canvas, Martinez builds what the museum calls viscerally tactile atmospheres from discarded and industrial materials, including fabric rags, recycled clothing and crushed stone.

The material choices give the work a direct relationship to questions of damage, transformation and environmental pressure. The museum connects ‘Blazing Bounty’ to the climate emergency in Texas, identified in the collection note as Martinez’s home state, pointing to wildfires, extreme heat and drought as conditions that inform the work’s atmosphere. The painting’s title and construction place abundance and destruction in close proximity, while the use of scraps and mineral aggregates emphasizes the physical character of that tension.

‘Abstraction, Continued’ gathers recent works made since 1999 from the Speed’s collection and is installed on the third floor of the museum’s North Building, in the two galleries adjoining the major exhibition ‘Abstract Expressionists: The Women.’ The museum describes it as a contemporary coda that extends rather than concludes the mid-century ideas set out in the adjacent galleries, and admission to ‘Abstract Expressionists: The Women’ is required to see it. Several of the paintings are permanent-collection acquisitions being shown at the Speed for the first time.

Alongside Martinez, the presentation includes work by Rita Ackermann, Lucy Bull, Keltie Ferris, Kwamé Azure Gomez, Magalie Guérin, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Dean Hubbell, Claude Lawrence, Maya Lin, Rebecca Morris, Thomas Nozkowski, Angel Otero, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Bai Yiyi. Works illustrated by the museum include Lucy Bull’s ‘Crimson Suspicion’ (2019), Patrick Dean Hubbell’s ‘You Came Into My Life In A Prayerful Way, I Didn’t Know I Would Need You So Much (Equine Medicine)’ (2023) and Rebecca Morris’s ‘Untitled (#06-22)’ (2022). The presentation is organized by Tyler Blackwell, the Speed’s curator of contemporary art.

The Speed Art Museum is located at 2035 South Third Street in Louisville. ‘Blazing Bounty’ is credited as Leslie Martinez, 2023, fabric and paper scraps, charcoal, fine ballast, pumice and acrylic on canvas, Gift of Robert Lowinger, accession number 2023.40.