DOUBLE ACT

Married artists Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez have built their lives and careers on parallel tracks. Now, with simultaneous shows at the same museum, they are converging. 

- Dodie Kazanjian

It's not every day that two artists who are married to each other have simultaneous solo shows at the same museum— and remain on speaking terms. This summer, Samantha (Sam) Moyer and Eddie Martinez will both mount shows at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Long Island. It helps that their work is very different, although related in its combination of abstract and figurative elements. Moyer’s massive stone sculptures and sculptural paintings, in which pieces of stone are set in plaster-covered, fresco-like canvases, have a precise, almost classical presence. Martinez’s powerhouse paintings, which often include collage elements, have an eccentric, slapdash energy that echoes Robert Rauschenberg’s anything- goes “combines” and Philip Guston’s cartoony figuration. They’re in constant motion, as is their maker. (He does sculpture too.)

“Creative collaborations and artist relationships are something to celebrate,” says Mónica RamírezMontagut, the Parrish’s director. “They have made a tremendous positive impact on the field of art.” (The Parrish will also be showing another artist couple, KAWS and Julia Chiang, a few weeks later.) Moyer and Martinez have been together for 17 years. Their four-year-old son, Arthur, is deeply embedded in Martinez’s recent work—images of a rattle and other toys turn up, and a real-life baby wipe stands in for the wing of a butterfly.