Taut, 2022
In my own paintings, I try to hold and release time for the viewer. Many of my works have no preconceived image or preliminary drawings. Instead, I just begin working directly on a canvas. Then, by adjusting the composition, revising color, painting over and correcting, a painting begins to tighten its orbit around a subject. This process mirrors music composition, in which disparate notes are found, revised and placed into sequence until they create tension and resonance.
Matt Phillips
Matt Phillips (b. 1979, Roanoke, Virginia) is an American artist whose abstract paintings explore the fundamental building blocks of visual experience—color, form, and structure—to generate dynamic, shifting spatial relationships. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Phillips often combines silica with pastel-hued pigments to produce rippling, wave-like surfaces. Through these material and chromatic experiments, he seeks to balance immediacy and deliberation, improvisation and structure.
Phillips has held solo exhibitions at The Fores Project (London), The Landing Gallery (Los Angeles), Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), Direktorenhaus Museum (Berlin), Studio d’Arte Raffaelli (Trento), Devening Projects (Chicago), Zillman Art Museum (Bangor), and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (New York). He has participated in numerous group shows at institutions including Nino Mier Gallery (Los Angeles), Hollis Taggart (New York), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson), Ampersand Gallery (Portland), and Palazzo Contini Martini (Mezzocorona, Italy). He has been an artist-in-residence at The Fores Project in London, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Air Serenbe, among others. His work is included in the public collections of Memorial Sloan Kettering David H. Koch Cancer Center, the University of Maine Museum of Art, and the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.
Phillips earned his BA in Art and Art History from Hampshire College and his MFA in Painting from Boston University. In addition to his practice, he is an active curator, critic, and educator, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City.