Josep Maria Martín
Born in 1961, lives and works in Barcelona.
Josep Maria Martín is a conceptual artist whose practice is deeply rooted in social engagement, institutional critique, and collaborative processes. For over three decades, he has explored the intersections of art, ethics, and the structures that shape our everyday lives – be they hospitals, schools, prisons, or bureaucracies. Martín resists the notion of the artist as an isolated creator, instead positioning himself as a facilitator, interlocutor, or instigator within real-world systems.
His works often emerge from long-term projects developed in dialogue with communities and institutions. These interventions – ranging from architectural installations to films, publications, and participatory actions – interrogate the power dynamics embedded in spaces of care, control, and administration. Rather than offering fixed solutions, Martín’s works create spaces of friction and reflection, opening possibilities for reimagining how we live and relate to one another.
Central to Martín’s practice is a radical commitment to process. Each project unfolds through extensive research, collaboration, and negotiation, making the work inseparable from the context in which it is embedded. His projects have addressed diverse themes such as the future of eldercare, the architecture of psychiatric hospitals, and the invisibility of migrant labor, often revealing hidden layers of vulnerability, resilience, and systemic contradiction.
Martín’s work has been exhibited in museums and biennials across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, including the Venice Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, and MACBA, among others. Yet many of his most powerful interventions exist outside the art world’s conventional circuits – in schools, clinics, and homes – where art functions not as spectacle, but as a tool for critical inquiry and collective imagination.
In Josep Maria Martín’s practice, art is not an object, but an encounter – a means of reshaping the narratives and norms that govern our shared spaces. Through this expanded understanding of what art can be and do, he invites us to rethink the boundaries between the aesthetic and the ethical, the private and the public, the personal and the political.
