Dylan Martinez — Prints & Paintings For Sale

Dylan Martinez: Resin Sculpture and the Poetics of Arrested Time

Dylan Martinez (b. 1994, Los Angeles) is a sculptor whose practice has attracted rapid and substantial collector attention for its singular focus: the resin-cast water balloon and floating goldfish bag — ordinary childhood objects elevated into shimmering, hyper-real sculptural forms that arrest time with uncanny precision. His works are simultaneously playful and philosophically loaded, and they have become some of the most desirable and recognisable objects in the current young collector market.

Practice and Process

Martinez's sculptures emerge from a technically demanding casting process that captures water-filled balloons and plastic bags at the precise moment before they burst, float away, or dissolve — freezing their bulging, translucent forms in optically clear resin. The result is an object of fundamental paradox: weightless in appearance but physically heavy; liquid in colour but solid to the touch; familiar in form but deeply strange as a sculptural presence.

This capacity to freeze a moment of physical transience in permanently solid material is the conceptual core of his practice. A water balloon captured in resin is not merely a reproduction of the balloon but a transformation of time itself — the moment before rupture made permanent, the ephemeral made monumental. In this sense, Martinez's sculptures engage with the same set of concerns that have occupied sculpture and photography across their histories: the relationship between the medium's capacity for arrested time and the flowing, irreversible nature of lived experience.

Series

Water Balloons. The foundational series, encompassing forms in single saturated colours — sapphire blue, emerald, lilac, rose — and larger multi-balloon groupings. Each work is unique, its specific form determined by the water and gravity at the moment of casting.

Goldfish Cracker Water Bags and Swedish Fish Water Bags. Plastic snack bags filled with water and embedded candy are cast in resin, creating objects that hover between street-corner confection and luxury art object. The commercial snack packaging and the candy visible through translucent water introduce an unmistakably American cultural dimension to the physical beauty of the form.

Pac-Man Ghosts. Iconic video game characters translated into volumetric cast resin forms, applying Martinez's freezing process to digital imagery and pop cultural memory with the same formal intelligence he brings to physical objects.

H2O/SiO2 Water Bags. Works that explore the elemental relationship between water and silica — the two most abundant molecules on earth — through material and title, connecting his practice to deeper questions of chemistry and materiality.

Market Performance

Martinez's market has developed with exceptional speed. Individual water balloon sculptures range from approximately $5,000 for smaller unique works to $30,000 and above for large-scale statement pieces. His limited edition runs sell out consistently, often with waiting lists forming before release. Demand has accelerated significantly, with collectors in the US, Europe, and Asia acquiring his works, and his sculptures commanding attention in design-forward and art publications internationally.

The work photographs extraordinarily well — an attribute that has driven significant social media following and introduced his practice to collector demographics well beyond traditional gallery networks — but the physical presence of each sculpture, with its precise weight and luminous optical quality, can only be fully understood in person. Collectors who handle a Martinez water balloon for the first time consistently describe the experience as genuinely surprising: the weight, the clarity, the sense of captured moment, all exceed expectation.

Collector Context

Martinez's work appeals particularly to younger collectors who value the intersection of contemporary art, popular culture, and artisanal craft — collectors who see no contradiction between formal sculptural achievement and accessible, joyful subject matter. His works are highly suited to residential collecting contexts where their beauty, scale variety, and conversation-generating quality make them ideal.

Acquiring Dylan Martinez Through Guy Hepner

Guy Hepner represents Dylan Martinez and maintains access to works across all his major series. His sculptures are produced in strictly limited quantities, and availability changes frequently. Contact our New York gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue to discuss current stock, commission options, and acquisition details.

Collecting Dylan Martinez Prints and Editions

Dylan Martinez works at the intersection of water photography, three-dimensional sculpture, and printmaking, producing images of extraordinary visual drama that translate the transient physics of water — balloons burst at high speed, splashing surfaces, liquid suspended in impossible forms — into permanent art objects of remarkable technical precision. His prints, typically produced as high-resolution archival pigment prints and in some cases as three-dimensional resin sculptures, have attracted a dedicated international collector base drawn to work that sits between photography, fine art, and the tradition of still-life.

His most recognised series — the water balloon explosions, the liquid crown works, and the Pac-Man ghost sculptures — have achieved significant secondary market attention and established him as one of the most distinctive voices working with photography and three-dimensional printing in the contemporary market. Edition sizes are strictly controlled, with prints individually signed and numbered by the artist and accompanied by certificates of authenticity. The technical precision required to produce his works — both the high-speed photography and the sculptural editions — ensures that the number of editions is genuinely limited.

For collectors new to Martinez's work, the photographic print editions represent the most accessible entry point, offering the full visual impact of his imagery in a format that is practical to display and store. The three-dimensional sculpture editions represent a more substantial collecting proposition and have demonstrated strong secondary market interest. Guy Hepner Gallery offers a curated selection of Dylan Martinez editions with full provenance documentation.