Matt Connors at The Modern Institute

Artist: Matt Connors

Exhibition title: FIGURE

Venue: The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane, Glasgow, UK

Date: November 13, 2019 – January 18, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow

FIGURE marks the second solo exhibition by Matt Connors at The Modern Institute, presenting a new body of work encompassing drawing, painting and tapestry across the gallery’s Aird’s Lane and Bricks spaces.

Abstracted by colour, Connors’ paintings and drawings are created through a process of layering and re-working forms extracted from his immediate environment. Overtime, these recognisable shapes are steadily obscured through the repetitive application of paint and line – the visual reduction and dilation of influence creating works imbued with an almost psychedelic presence.

Indebted to the physicality of their production – process, materiality and action exist as equivalent points of departure in Connors’ work. Details are seized upon, drafted and re-worked – either within one painting or simultaneously across several; accidental drips and marks accumulated through time spent in his studio become integral to the work, his surfaces registering each moment in their creation.

Indeed, if painting can be thought of as an act of pushing through from one space to another, the installation of Connors’ works allude to the struggle and scrutiny of this process. Hung between four free standing walls, the tight formation of which forces one to encounter much of the work as if in a ‘tunnel’ between these two metaphysical spaces.

Accompanying his new paintings and drawings, Connors will present his first tapestry. Fabricated at Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, the work re-imagines his painting by the same name, Translated Union Bug, 2019; the tapestry’s shift in scale, material and form expanding the physical potential of his painted works.

Matt Connors (B. 1973, Chicago; Lives and works in New York) Selected solo exhibitions include ‘The Flat Voice’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2016); ‘Zonder’, Karma, Amagansett, New York (2014); White Flag Library, Saint Louis (2013); ‘Reverse Telescopes with Inflected Baffles’, KARMA, New York (2013); ‘Impressionism’, MoMA PS1, New York, (2012); ‘Gas… Telephone…One Hundred Thousand Rubles’, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011) and Concentrations 54: Fergus Feehily and Matt Connors, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2011). In 2016 Connors had his firstsolo exhibition at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. A monograph of Connors’ work titled ‘GUI(L)DE’ was published this year.

Matt Connors, Installation View, FIGURE, The Modern Institute Aird’s Lane, 2019, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Bird Flying Through a Tunnel, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 304.8 x 244.5 x 3.2 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Pieta, 2019, Acrylic and crayon on canvas, 154.9 x 137.8 x 3.2 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Stripes in Nature, 2019, Acrylic, oil and and crayon on canvas, 190.5 x 153 x 3.2 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Repeat Clarice, 2019, Oil, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 71.1 x 64.1 x 2.9 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, (The) Carpet, 2019, Acrylic on plaster, 121.9 x 111.8 x 5.1 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Translated Union Bug, 2019, Wool, cotton and cotton wrap, 180 x 160 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Keyboard of Light, 2019, Oil, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 120 x 109.9 x 3.2 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, Second Pieta, 2019, Oil, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 120 x 109.9 x 3.2 cm, Photo: Patrick Jameson

Matt Connors, After Scriabin (Green), 2019, Coloured pencil on paper, artist’s frame, 54.5 x 45.5 x 1.9 cm, Photo: Adam Reich

Matt Connors, After Scriabin (Orange), 2019, Coloured pencil on paper, artist’s frame, 54.5 x 45.5 x 1.9 cm, Photo: Adam Reich

Matt Connors, After Scriabin (Red), 2019, Coloured pencil on paper, artist’s frame, 54.5 x 45.5 x 1.9 cm, Photo: Adam Reich