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international painting annual 3 exhibition-in-print
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Matt Metzger
Cincinnati, Ohio

contact@metzgerfinearts.com

www.metzgerfinearts.com




detail image

statement

I want to work with paradoxes. These paintings explore the poles of emptiness and fullness; movement and stillness; transience and permanence; forms dissolved in haze, atmosphere and light, yet substantiated; exaltation and despair; the infinite in the finite; presence and the void.  I hope for the work to, in a way, deconstruct and then transcend these opposites.

I approach a new painting in a state of indifference, allowing the image to emerge from intuition and the process itself, without reference--shaped by chance but, in the end, grounded in intentionality and the subtle motive of capturing these paradoxes. The landscape emerges as the best means for me to work with these opposites. This intention to capture paradox extends to how the paintings are viewed. In an overwhelming landscape, harsh, indifferent, opposite to arguably our most endearing human traits, we recognize our humanness. And when we feel most human our feelings are often, paradoxically, the most incomprehensible.  This incomprehensibility allows for different interpretations of the paintings by different viewers.  The viewer takes what he or she wants (and in some cases needs) to take from each painting.  In this way, the work is vulnerable to interpretation.

This all has connotations of romanticism in the historical sense.  But I don‚t evaluate the work‚s evocation of romanticism in strictly historical terms because it expresses fundamental contemporary attitudes. Attitudes still with us, and that, perhaps, must be with us.


bio

born: 1982


education

University of Cincinnati, JD, 2007


selected awards/honors

21 Under 31 Artists to Collect, Southwest Art Magazine, 2012


selected publications

Paris Review, Online Edition, Paris, FR
Poets Artists Magazine, December 2012 Edition, New York, NY
21 Under 31 Artists to Collect, September 2012, Southwest Art Magazine


selected solo or two-person exhibits

Fifth Street Gallery; Conversations in Wood; Cincinnati, OH; 2012


selected group shows

Mason Murer Gallery; Fall Group Show; Atlanta, GA; 2012

 

 

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