Chris Martin’s “In Memory of My Feelings”: Glitter, Night Skies and Slow Time at David Kordansky, Los Angeles

Some painters finish a canvas in an afternoon. Chris Martin will, if necessary, wait thirty years. One untitled painting in his new exhibition carries the date range 1988–2018, a span long enough to contain several careers. That patience — and its opposite, a delight in glitter, foam and loud colour — is the engine of Chris Martin’s “In Memory of My Feelings” at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, on view from 13 November to 16 December 2026.

Chris Martin, In Memory of My Feelings: the borrowed title

The title is lifted from Frank O’Hara, the New York School poet whose long 1956 poem of the same name moves through selves, memories and masks with conversational speed. It is a telling choice. O’Hara wrote as if talking to a friend across a table, mixing the high and the throwaway; Martin paints in much the same register. A canvas can hold a cosmic sky and a joke, a homage and a smear, without either cancelling the other out.

Who is Chris Martin?

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1954, Martin has been a Brooklyn painter since the 1980s and now divides his time between Brooklyn and the Catskills. For a long stretch he was a painter’s painter — admired by peers, less familiar to the wider public — before a steady run of institutional attention. He has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Corcoran Gallery of Art (both 2011) and at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (2015). Skira published a monograph, Paintings, in 2017. His work sits in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, among others, and recent group appearances include the Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Artists Exhibition (2024) and The Drawing Center’s The World Is The Work (2026).

Materials that refuse good taste

Martin’s surfaces are built, not simply painted. The gallery’s description of the new body of work points to glitter, foam discs, layered paint and recurring forms. A work such as Les Demoiselles (2024–2025), listed as acrylic and glitter on canvas, signals the method: an art-historical title — an obvious nod to Picasso — delivered through a material more often associated with craft tables and nightclubs. The effect is disarming. Glitter catches light unevenly, so the paintings change as you walk past them; the foam discs sit up off the canvas like planets or buttons. Martin treats these “low” materials with complete seriousness, and that seriousness is precisely what keeps them from tipping into kitsch.

What the exhibition contains

According to the gallery, the show brings together small, medium and large-scale canvases made during what Kordansky describes as the artist’s sixth decade of painting. Their subjects are nature, the night sky, landscape, jazz and the passage of time — the familiar coordinates of Martin’s world. Several works took years or decades to resolve, which makes the exhibition something more than a presentation of recent output: it is a record of paintings that were allowed to sit, wait and change until they were ready. The gallery frames the whole as an exploration of emotional connection, experimentation and play.

Jazz matters here as more than subject matter. Martin’s compositions often behave like improvisation over a known structure: a circle, a horizon, a star shape returns again and again, but the handling shifts each time. Viewers who know his earlier homages to musicians and fellow painters will recognise the rhythm.

Kordansky and the Los Angeles context

David Kordansky Gallery, on West Edgewood Place in Mid-City, has become one of the city’s most important venues for painting, with a programme that pairs established figures and younger artists. Martin has shown there before — his Recent Paintings occupied the gallery in 2022 — so this is a return visit rather than an introduction. It also lands in a busy November: Ivan Morley’s new paintings, Trees, open at the gallery the same evening, and a presentation of Abraham Lincoln Walker’s work is scheduled for the same dates, making 13 November a natural night for a painting-focused visit.

There is something fitting about seeing Martin in Los Angeles. A painter so attentive to light — starlight, sunrise, glitter’s scattered reflections — gains from a city where daylight itself is a medium.

Why it matters for painters and collectors

• For painters: Martin is a rare model of a career built on stubborn duration. Seeing works dated across decades is a lesson in when — and whether — to call a painting finished.
• For collectors: museum holdings, a monograph and sustained gallery representation give the work a solid institutional footing, while the scale range in this show means not every work is monumental.
• For everyone else: these are pictures that reward a slow walk-through. The surfaces simply cannot be read from a phone screen.

Visiting information

David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Place, Los Angeles, CA 90019. 13 November – 16 December 2026; opening reception Friday 13 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am–6pm; phone +1 323 935 3030. Read the gallery’s own text on the official exhibition page, find address, hours and links on our In Memory of My Feelings listing, and browse more openings in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Dubai, Istanbul and Ankara on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.