José Jun Martínez Puerto Rican, b. 1992
José Jun Martínez is a London-based painter whose work emerges from a sustained engagement with landscape, memory, and the sensory experience of place. Over the past decade, Martínez has developed a distinctive painting practice rooted in direct encounters with natural environments, often working in remote tropical settings before transforming these experiences into richly material, immersive compositions. His paintings navigate the space between observation and imagination, translating fleeting perceptions, atmospheric conditions, and personal reflection into luminous surfaces that oscillate between abstraction and landscape.
Martínez received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (2015), and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2024), where he was awarded the prestigious Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize. He first gained wider recognition through his participation in the 2da Gran Bienal Tropical (Puerto Rico, 2016), the influential international exhibition curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, which challenged conventional exhibition formats by moving art beyond traditional museum spaces and presenting works across public beaches and tropical landscapes. The project became a landmark event in Caribbean contemporary art and helped position a new generation of artists within an international dialogue. More recently, he participated in the Second Biennial of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan (2023), and presented work in the Royal College of Art’s public MA Painting exhibition in London (2024).
Recent solo exhibitions include Donde el Sol se Refugia at Adhesivo Contemporary, Mexico City (2026); Perennial Paroxysm at Ordovas, London (2025); The Hymn of the Toads at Matt Carey-Williams, London (2025); and Hermano de las Flores at the Museo de San Juan, Puerto Rico (2025). Across these exhibitions, Martínez has continued to expand a practice that brings together the immediacy of painting from life with a deeply personal engagement with the tropical landscape, exploring the shifting relationships between perception, memory, ecology, and place.
Among his distinctions, Martínez was awarded the prestigious Valerie Beston Artists’ Trust Prize in 2024, recognising exceptional emerging talent graduating from the Royal College of Art. He was also shortlisted for the Chadwell Award, one of the United Kingdom’s leading prizes for emerging painters. Earlier in his career, he received a DFA Fellowship Award at the Vermont Studio Center (2018) and participated in the residency programme at Galería Leyendecker, Tenerife. Moving between Puerto Rico and London, Martínez has developed a painterly language that is at once deeply rooted in the Caribbean and internationally resonant. Through his exploration of ecology, perception, colour, and materiality, he is emerging as one of the most compelling young painters of his generation, bringing a renewed perspective to contemporary painting through an immersive engagement with landscape and the transformative possibilities of paint itself.