Born in Born in Marseille (along the French Riviera), the second largest city in France after Paris, Gerard Marti followed the footsteps of his Spanish-born father and attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts at the age of 18.  A couple of years later, free from the mandatory National Army Service, he moved to Paris to pursuit a career in the music industry.  First as a singer and a songwriter, then as a record producer and video director for E.M.I. Records, one of the largest  record companies in Europe.  

In 1990, he moved to the United States, making Maui his home with his wife, Colleen.  Through his passion for music and his personal relationships with some of the world’s top entertainers, they created Célébrités Galleries, which was the first to feature art by celebrity artists, all internationally renowned- John Lennon, Miles Davis, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Ringo Starr, Jerry Garcia, Ronnie Wood, Paul Stanley, Tony Bennett, Richard Chamberlain and Billy Dee Williams, Mick Fleetwood, Michael Madsen to name a few…  

After having spent a half-century around some of the most creative luminaries of our time, Marti is finally going back to where he first started- in a typical style of Post-Modern Eclecticism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Realism and Pop Art- which he uses to produce a style that collapses into fragmented components, pop music, advertising, technology and urban street poetry.  Marti is engaged in an exercise of free association where images and icons of contemporary culture collide in a haphazard juxtaposition of style and traditions that give to his work a distinctly European flavor.  

“Pop Art should be glamorous, expendable, mass-produced and popular.  My pieces combine all of these elements.  People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images.  I question the idea of authority and the traditional role of the artist.  I like to take something from the everyday world and transform it into art.  Most of my paintings involve the post-modernist technique of appropriation of anonymous images.  My inspiration comes from the imagery of consumer society and popular culture.”  

Marti’s works combines anonymous images of women from film stills, advertisements and erotic icons.  It is sexy, gimmicky and glamorous.  Some of the pieces might shock the viewer by forcing them to face their own mortality.    

“The role of an artist is to make the invisible, visible.  Art is an open window in your own mind.”  

Gerard Marti  

View the Gerard Marti Gallery