Landon Metz is a New York-based artist recognised for his stained-dye paintings of abstract, lyrical shapes. While working mostly with painting, Metz has also created sculptures based on his painted works.
Read MoreMetz primarily works in monochrome, limiting his palette to create subtle, curvy shapes that repeat across the canvas or morph into different forms in succession. His paintings vary in scale, ranging from intimately sized canvases to large-scale works consisting of multiple canvases.
Metz paints directly on unprimed canvas, pouring diluted dye onto the surface. Allowing pools of paint to accumulate, the artist then takes a brush to manipulate the paint into his characteristic shapes. The colour tends to be darker towards the edges of these forms, resulting in a mesmerising gradation effect. Once completed, Metz's untitled canvases are often exhibited as diptychs or in groups that create a sense of seriality and rhythm.
A self-taught artist, Metz has cited pioneers of Abstract and Colour Field painting as his inspirations, including Agnes Martin, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. The planes of colour in his paintings, as well as the interplay between positive and negative space, also derive in part from the vast desert of Arizona, where Metz grew up.
A recurrent concern across Metz's practice is the spatial relationship between his paintings and their surroundings. In his solo exhibition, Michael Jackson Penthouse, at New York's Retrospective in 2014, Metz installed his paintings in unconventional spaces or configurations, including on the exterior wall of the gallery, above a staircase, and in the corner of the exhibition space.
Metz continues to experiment with exhibition spaces, placing his works in relation to the architecture of their respective display spaces. In Landon Metz, a solo show at James Fuentes Gallery, New York in 2015, the artist presented large, irregularly shaped canvases in the shape of the forms found in his other paintings.
Metz has described his works as being 'site-responsive' as opposed to 'site-specific', saying that they 'work with, rather than altering, the architecture of the spaces they inhabit' in a 2022 interview with Emergent Magazine.
Metz has held solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Sean Kelly, New York (2022); Love Songs, Waddington Custot, London (2021); Clarity, Francesca Minini, Milan (2020); Three Eleven, Andersen's, Copenhagen (2019); Asymmetrical Symmetry, Sean Kelly, New York (2018); &, Massimo Minini, Brescia (2016); Michael Jackson Penthouse, Retrospective, Hudson, New York (2014).
Group exhibitions include Reflections: Open Ended, Gana Art, Seoul (2020); Greffes, Villa Medici, Rome (2017); Splotch, Sperone Westwater, New York (2016); 173 E 94th St / Chaussee de Waterloo 550, Paul Kasmin at Middlemarch, Brussels (2014); Space Whole Karaoke, Middlemarch, Brussels (2013).
Landon Metz's website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Ocula | 2022
