Testing the Waters

January 31-February 14, 2026
Westside Market location

Martha's is delighted to present new work by Martha’s gallery artists.

Opening reception will be held at our Westside Market location on Saturday, January 26, from 4:00-6:00 PM, and the show will run through February 14, 2026. Please reach out to Meredith (mer@marthas.gallery) or Ricky (ricky@marthas.gallery) with any inquiries or questions.

Artist Statements

Moll Brau

Moll Brau is a multi-disciplinary artist from Shreveport, Louisiana, with practices in painting, video work, performance, and installation. Her most recent body of paintings are a collision of the real and imagined with fierce blends of gestural abstraction and figuration. Exploring the relationship between the feminine and the grotesque, Brau continually examines power sources, gender norms, and the strengths and limitations of the human body. Brau’s witty narrative references and visual motifs display modes of triumph over adversity through anguish, beauty, and rage. Moll Brau earned her BFA from Louisiana State University and is currently based in Austin, Texas.

Conner O’Leary

In his paintings, Conner O’Leary’s visual fluency is robust, and his careful, burnished hyperreal still lifes fit comfortably in an esteemed history of painting yet have their own unique and uncanny charge. O’Leary collides a high level of figurative skill with fantastical and dream-like details. These paintings are aesthetically beguiling but suffused with something more, some ineffable question, or, as Leonard Bernstein once said, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is the tension between the contradictory answers.”

Recent notable exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Martha’s, Austin (2025); 12.26, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Half Gallery, New York, NY (2024), a group exhibition at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA (2025), along with the Long Live Surrealism! 1924- Today exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX.

Max Kremer

Max Kremer (B. 1999, Houston, TX) seeks out moments in nature where something “ordinary” breaks through a sense of familiarity and becomes alien. He paints from imagination, so each painting is an assemblage of impactful moments that have stuck in his memory. Preservation stems from respect, so he visualizes and expresses his respect for the natural world.

Kremer portrays landscapes as a collection of animated parts woven together to create a breathing, moving being. A loose perspective and lack of an explicit focal point suggest there is nowhere you are supposed to stand and nothing you are forced to look at. The paintings are a "choose your own adventure" in a sense. The interplay between positive and negative space allows him to transition from more representational scenes to abstracted spaces where the viewer's imagination takes over.

RF . Alvarez

RF. Alvarez (b. 1988, San Antonio, TX) is a queer artist based in Austin, Texas. His figurative paintings are characterized by nocturnal color palettes and evocative scenes that blend personal memory with romantic allegory. Using a process of dry-brushing paint onto raw linen – and borrowing stylistic techniques from Old Masters – Alvarez creates luminous images of queer joy , revelry, and contemplation; countering a historical narrative of queer alienation and erasure in the American West. With deep family roots in both Texas and Mexico, Alvarez uses visions of friendship, indulgence and tenderness to juxtapose with Southern machismo – illuminating the vulnerability that can hide beneath the steely façade of masculinity and the societies it creates.

Alvarez has shown with Almine Rech in Paris, Taymour Grahne Projects in London, Megan Mulrooney in Los Angeles, and Martha’s in Austin. His work has been featured in The New York Times, T Magazine, Texas Monthly, The Brooklyn Rail, and Cultured Magazine. He received a BA from Wesleyan University.