Matt Saunders

 

We are pleased to present Matt Saunders’ first exhibition at Marian Goodman gallery. The artist will show a new animated film, interrelated photographic prints and a recent three-channel video installation.

 

In his new animation, the artist connects thousands of drawings made with ink on mylar (a polyester film) into a roiling and de-centered reel of short scenes coming from a variety of sources. The work is inspired by extracts of unidentified “lost films”, and by the research process of index cards. Rather than a stable vision, Matt Saunders presents a silent and ever-shifting field of small gestures and fugitive moments, carrying on a changing and almost compulsive engagement with the characteristics of film. 

 

In the lower gallery, he shows portraits of late actors from the series of works Agents and Crowds. These large photo prints are all produced without a camera. The artist starts from paintings combining oil, ink, spray paint and tape on mylar or linen. Used as negatives, these paintings are placed on top of photographic paper in the dark room. Light passes through them, directly exposing the paper, which is then developed. As ersatz paintings, they cast their subjects into critical and emotional dialogue with their materials. 

 

Passageworks, is a three-channel animated film, composed of scanned drawings. The artist uses the technique of rotoscoping, which consists of tracing the image directly from a sequence of film stills. A precursor to the recent works, this animation moves through a collection of different scenes, notations and ways of drawing. 

 

Old avant-garde films and television archives are Matt Saunders’ main sources of inspiration. He re-casts this cinematographic iconography into paintings, themselves transformed into photographs or animations. These hybrid forms interrogate how images live in different materials and in the viewer’s experience. 

 

Matt Saunders was born in 1975 in Tacoma (Washington, USA) and lives in Berlin and Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), where he is a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Harvard and at Yale University, where he trained as a painter. In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Chicago. His recent group exhibitions include: Plot for a Biennial, 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011), The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2011), The more things change, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2010-2011), Untitled (History Painting), University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (2009), Freeway Balconies, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008), Blind Date Istanbul, Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2007).