Enrique Marty: Storm Scenes

Keteleer Gallery is very pleased to present Storm Scenes, a solo exhibition by Enrique Marty (b. 1969. Salamanca, Spain). Marty’s third solo exhibition with the gallery consists of an entirely new series of oil paintings.

Storm Scenes approaches landscape not as a passive backdrop but as an active and unstable system in which multiple forms of life, memory and imagination intersect. The title takes as its point of departure Giorgione’s Tempest, a painting in which atmosphere, narrative and nature remain suspended in an unresolved state. In Storm Scenes, this suspension becomes a central condition: the landscape is not a scene of events, but a field of latent tensions.

The project consists of a series of small tempera paintings on panel organized into three cycles of three works, alongside a group of sculptures that reinterpret and transform elements from the paintings into three-dimensional forms. Additional independent paintings extend the series beyond its internal structure, opening it toward more explicit narrative and social dimensions.

The paintings engage with the Northern tradition of landscape, particularly the works of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where nature appears as a densely populated and encyclopedic field. Yet in Storm Scenes, this order is subtly destabilized. Species, bodies, objects and temporalities coexist in improbable proximity, forming a complex ecology in which the human is no longer central but one presence among many.

The sculptural works function as condensations of this pictorial universe. Rather than illustrating the paintings, they extract fragments, figures and motifs and reorganize them into autonomous forms. In this shift from surface to volume, narrative becomes structure and representation becomes presence. The viewer no longer observes from a distance but moves around a field of relations that unfolds in space.

Across the entire body of work, the storm operates as a conceptual device. It is not only a meteorological event, but a moment of instability in which systems—natural, social, symbolic—reveal their fragility. Sometimes the storm is visible as eruption or atmospheric tension; at other times it is embedded in organic growth, accumulation, or bodily transformation.

Storm Scenes thus proposes a speculative ecology: a world in which images, bodies and histories coexist within a precarious equilibrium, constantly shifting between order and excess, between beauty and disturbance.