Breanna Cee Martins (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in New York. Known for her large-scale watercolors mounted on canvas, she paints ghostly figures of phantom people and children that evoke faded photographs or half-forgotten memories.
Spontaneity is at the core of her practice. Mixing watercolor with hydrogen peroxide and bleach, Martins lets images swim to the surface, and each work reveals itself only once it has dried. The materials resist the illusion of control, and her paintings seem conjured out of thin air. She imposes her will where she can and releases where she can't, working with brushes, spray bottles, pipettes, magic erasers, and sandpaper.
Martins's family albums were lost when she immigrated to the United States. In their absence, she works from found black-and-white family portraits sourced from thrift stores, markets, and vintage shops, or donated to her. In doing so, she preserves, memorializes, and gives new life to the people she discovers, perhaps seeking traces of her own family along the way, and paying tribute to those left behind. She imagines narratives for her figures, often with an undertone of potential violence, catching them on the precipice of climactic events: children playing in the ocean as one pushes the other too hard toward the water, a boy staring forlornly as his balloons begin to deflate, a lone figure floating in a pool with his head just above the surface. Women are rendered in delicate, layered washes, their limbs flowing into one another. As critic Donald Kuspit has written of her work, the female body appears "pretty but fierce."
A thread of nostalgia runs throughout. The photographs she uses capture moments of wonder, melancholy, strength, and vulnerability, inviting viewers to find themselves in the images. Watercolor itself echoes the immediacy of childhood and its inevitable fading. Her work captures the joy of childhood, the angst of growing up, and the complicated dynamics of adulthood, while asking whether childhood was ever really simple, or only seems so in retrospect.
Martins received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2011 and her BFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2009, and studied at the Scuola di Grafica in Venice. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, with solo exhibitions including Holy Terrors at Col Gallery, San Francisco (2024); Suffer the Little Children at Satellite Art Gallery, New York (2024); Poor Unfortunate Souls at Aeronaut, Boston (2024); The Fruit of Her Loins Went Rotten at ArtMiami (2023); and The Labyrinth at Palazzo Ca' Zanardi, Venice (2021). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Sotheby's, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Flowers Gallery, among others. She was a 2016 Whitney Museum Art Party Featured Artist, a 2024 Ortega y Gasset Projects Finalist, and recipient of the Richard Kubiak Memorial Curatorial Award. Her work is held in the collections of Beth DeWoody, Kate Spade, Brooke Shields, David Spade, and David Kratz, among others.