Matt Connors
Pre - Echo
June 2, 2007–June 30, 2007The Breeder, Athens
THE BREEDER is pleased to announce the upcoming solo exhibition of Los-Angeles born, Berlin-based artist Matt Connors, titled Pre-echo. Matt Connors’ work was presented in the group show When The Moon Shines on the Moonshine, curated by Robert Meijer at THE BREEDER, in 2006.
Matt Connors makes small-scale paintings that combine observation and invention into a personal painterly grammar of abstraction that is simultaneously lyrical and awkward, arbitrary and purposeful. Color, pattern and line converge with shifts in scale, texture and opacity to pose formal, and conceptual problems and then try to solve them (or not). The paintings reenact and reference histories of modernist and minimalist painting, while at the same time positing subtle arguments for the form’s persistent and perhaps uneasy relevance, renewal and survival.
The new body of work investigates abstraction, decoration and image-making within a limited number of formal moves, whose stripped down combinations, repetitions, and re/de-constructions nudge the classic abstract expressionist formalism of ‘push and pull’ from formal play into more conceptual and emotional territory. Grids, stripes, circles and squares often taken from decorative structures gleaned from everyday usage (a hyper personal lexicon of graphic, architectural and popular culture motifs) are re-presented as, and within, frames, irises, misaligned systems and off-register imprints. Similarly, evidence of mistakes and earlier versions survive within the finished work, and rather than depicting “space” or specific “images”, the resulting paintings emerge as tenuous, questioning, and ultimately poetic ciphers in and of themselves.
Recent exhibitions include:
2006 RAGGED curated by Josh Blackwell, Kate Macgarry gallery, London
Smoking Mirrors, China Art Objects, L.A.
Turn the Beat Around, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY
