Matt Connors: Bleeding Abstraction

Matt Connors b. 1973, United States Follow +

Based between New York and Los Angeles, Matt Connors is an abstract painter whose colourful and alluring images contain Modernist idioms amidst their complex, bleeding layers.

His solo exhibition Swap just opened at Xavier Hufkens’ Van Eyckstraat location in Brussels, showing works on paper and photographic prints alongside paintings (6 March–3 April 2021).

While Connors’ approach to colour and form sometimes recalls the characteristics of Colour Field Painting, he disrupts this to experiment with techniques more closely associated with Helen Frankenthaler and even Jules Olitski’s soaked canvas paintings, ensuring a renewed sense of both transparency and depth.

On closer inspection, one is struck by the brilliantly spontaneous handling of paint, including accidental drips and splatters that permeate flat spaces of colour, contributing to the story of their production.

This, combined with the use of darker tones and the bleeding of saturated colours, alludes to something deceptively contemporary in terms of technique, not unlike Tacita Dean‘s ‘FILM stills’ (2014) or Wade Guyton‘s printed paintings.

Connors has successfully developed a coherent body of work over the last few years, surprisingly unified in style despite a varied palette, whilst allowing individual works to function on their own with the level of immediacy and clarity that is required for abstract paintings.

Extremely sought after by collectors and now residing in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Connors is firmly establishing himself as an artist who’s staying the course and provides a welcome distraction from the swathes of figurative painters. —[O]

WORKS

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Main image: Matt Connors, Stopped Step (2021) (detail). Acrylic and pencil on canvas. 57.3 × 45.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. Photo: HV-studio.