Matthew Couper was born in New Zealand and is based in Las Vegas after immigrating to the USA in 2010. His practice over the past decade has appropriated aspects of western art history traditions including Trecento, Quattrocento and the Baroque and he now uses established narrative traditions to discuss the space between myth, religion and art politics. Huffington Post art critic John Seed recently referred to Couper as an "artist with a Kafkaesque view of the world" whose imagery suggests "a pagan Catholic Cirque du Soleil”.
Read MoreIn 2003, Couper was awarded a Royal Over-Seas League International Scholarship to work and travel in the UK. He returned the following year to exhibit at Jerwood Gallery, London. He held his first public solo exhibition with published monograph, The Museum Of Inherent Vice at the Sarjeant Gallery, New Zealand, after receiving a nine-month residency at the Tylee Cottage Artist in Residence program in 2007. His exhibition Thirty-Three (with gallery monograph) is touring a number of New Zealand public art galleries and museums from 2012 to 2014.
He exhibits regularly in the USA, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. His works are represented in public collections throughout New Zealand (Sarjeant Gallery, The Real Art Roadshow, Celia Dunlop Foundation and James Wallace Collection) and internationally (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Rome and Brisbane, Cirque du Soleil Resident Show Division) and in private collections in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Thailand.
