Vase of Hyacinths is the first London exhibition by Chilean painter Juan Martinez Macari, following his first major solo exhibition in Chile last year.
For Martinez Macari, painting and gardening are parallel, inseparable practices. Over the past nine years, the artist has lived in relative seclusion in Idahue, a rural area approximately two hours south of Santiago, where he has cultivated an extensive garden while continuing to paint. The rhythms of daily labour in the garden have become the conditions through which his paintings are made.
Martinez Macari cultivates lilies, liras, anemones, hyacinths, and other flowering plants, tending them through the changing seasons. At the end of a day’s work, he cuts selected blooms, arranges them in simple vases, and paints them. These still lifes are accompanied by paintings of the tools and shoes that bear the traces of labour, as well as quiet observations of the landscape and domestic surroundings that structure his everyday life. Rather than treating these subjects as symbolic motifs, the paintings emerge from sustained familiarity, repetition, and close attention. Each work records an ongoing relationship between cultivation and representation.
His practice proposes painting as an extension of care: a process shaped by patience, manual work, and prolonged observation. Gardening is not simply the subject of the paintings but their precondition, establishing a temporal and material framework that informs both what is painted and how painting unfolds. The resulting works occupy a space between still life, landscape, and diary, where acts of looking are inseparable from acts of tending.
Martinez Macari studied at the University of Chile, graduating with distinction. In 2025, he presented his first major solo exhibition at Galería Patricia Ready in Santiago.