Enrique Martínez Celaya at The Wende Museum

Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Sextant (installation view) (2025–26). Image courtesy of the artist and the Wende Museum. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

A sugar-coated replica of Enrique Martínez Celaya’s childhood home appears like a sparkling apparition in The Wende Museum’s central gallery; it’s at 90% scale, pristine and white and modern. But you cannot go inside—its door does not open. Peering through its slatted windows, your view is obscured; you see some faded paintings, a sculpture of a small yellow bird on the wall. There are drawings underfoot just outside of the house—enlarged versions from letters young Martínez Celaya sent to his father, who left Cuba for Spain about two years before the rest of the family moved in 1972.¹ One shows a rocket with shaky streams of fire blasting behind it, another a plane flying above letters falling like bombs: SOS, SOS. You assume the thwarted perspective of a child trying to make sense of something beyond their grasp, and of an adult parsing their past. The sugar is like the scrim of time over memories—everything is covered in a crystalline glaze, some images preserved, others illegible, lost.

Enrique Martínez Celaya, El cohete (The Rocket) (2025). Oil, wax, and sugar on canvas, 60 x 50 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the Wende Museum. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

The Wende Museum’s first solo exhibition by a visual artist (the third and final installment in Martínez Celaya’s trilogy about Cuba), The Sextant quietly connects personal and political histories. The story of a boy missing his father, on the verge of emigration, becomes a conduit into the anxiety and displacement that defined life in Cuba during the Cold War. The original house, an unlikely modernist construction built by the artist’s father in the town of Nueva Paz, was completed in 1963—just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just before the artist’s birth. It was, in Martínez Celaya’s words, the “waiting room” where he spent the first few years of his life.² The family would leave their home behind in the decades following the 1959 Cuban Revolution—and over a million Cubans would do the same.³

But Martínez Celaya suggests there is no leaving, not really, exploring instead the loops of departure and return, the ongoing salvage of memory and material from the past. A sextant is a nautical navigation device that measures the angle between a celestial object and the horizon; in the gallery, everything appears in relation to the house, this point of origin. A stoic white horse stands in front of it, tethered to a sled piled high with sugar that a conveyor belt (a nod to the sugar cane refinery where Martínez Celaya’s father worked) carries to the roof. Crashing through the ceiling, the sugar accumulates inside the house like a destructive dust. On the surrounding walls of the gallery, paintings rendered in stormy palettes emphasize transitions, showing figures walking away from the house, from us. The Wende focuses on preserving and reconstructing fragile materials and endangered records, and through The Sextant, treats Martínez Celaya’s childhood as one such account. Standing at the threshold of this house as it fills up with sugar, the tension between building and abandoning, remembering and destroying, is keenly felt.

Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Sextant (installation view) (2025–26). Image courtesy of the artist and the Wende Museum. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant runs from November 8, 2025 – October 11, 2026 at the Wende Museum.

About the author

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Aleina Grace Edwards is an arts writer and essayist focused on preserving and promoting locally-rooted arts and culture.

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