ROBERT MARTIN

A Gift of Tears

EDJI Gallery is pleased to present A Gift of Tears, the first solo exhibition in Europe by American artist Robert Martin.

Opening Preview : Wednesday, September 2, 6–9pm

RendezVous Brussels Art Week Opening : Thursday, September 10, 6–9pm

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Bringing together a new body of paintings, watercolours and a wood and steel installation, the exhibition considers how emotion can shape our experience of the world, and how moments of grief, tenderness, anger or wonder can bring with them an intensified sense of connection to the people, places and living things around us.

The exhibition developed during a period of significant change in Martin’s life, in which experiences of loss and transition brought a heightened awareness of emotion into their work. Its title refers to the Christian idea of the “gift of tears” (gratia lacrimarum), the belief that crying can bring a person closer to a spiritual understanding of the world. Martin approaches this idea outside the boundaries of organised religion. Here, spirituality emerges through the experience of feeling itself: the moments in which being deeply affected by something makes us conscious of our place within a larger world.

Nature provides one of the exhibition’s most persistent ways of approaching this connection. Animals, trees, water, changing skies and other natural forms recur throughout the works, sometimes drawn from particular memories and sometimes carrying their own symbolic associations. In observing them, Martin looks for ways in which the non-human world can offer context for human experience. A tree divided into two trunks following an early trauma becomes an image of resilience; a newborn fawn returned to the earth speaks to unrealised possibility; the migration of birds complicates the idea of home as a fixed geographical place.

This is particularly present in eight watercolours whose intricate compositions take cues from stained glass. Birds, snakes, leaves and other natural forms appear within geometric structures of colour and light, giving ordinary encounters in nature an almost devotional intensity. Martin’s time in Belgium, and particularly visits to churches in Ghent, brought the visual language of religious art more directly into the work. Yet these references are less concerned with Christianity itself than with the capacity of sacred imagery to make something appear significant. In Martin’s watercolours, it is the natural world that assumes this heightened presence.

The paintings on panel bring this language into a more personal register. Many originate in specific memories: family members searching for stones in the headwaters of the Mississippi, the light surrounding a figure at sunset, the interior of a grandmother’s dining room. Elsewhere, Martin turns to self-portraiture to give form to more difficult emotional states. In Immolation, a figure is displaced by the image of a fire, recalling a moment of profound sadness while also introducing symbols of endurance and resilience. Across these works, personal experience becomes a means of examining something more elemental: the capacity to feel, and through feeling, to recognise oneself as part of the world.

At the centre of the exhibition, Mural of Wild Geese Flying (Squinting Toward the Sun Through Kaleidoscopic Tears) extends these ideas into physical space. A painted flock continues through sculptural geese moving across the gallery, reflecting Martin’s shifting understanding of home as something found less in a fixed place than through movement and connection. In the mural, light refracts through a tear-filled gaze, transforming sadness into colour. It encapsulates a central idea of A Gift of Tears: that intense emotion can heighten our perception of the world and deepen our sense of belonging within it.

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A Gift of Tears is on view at EDJI Gallery in Brussels until October 3rd 2026.