Matt Connors: Bottoms

Matt Connors has long considered the emotional, intellectual and physical relationship between himself and his materials. His paintings refer to his life and also to his studio. Through the interplay between iconic and indexical representation so essential to his work, Connors builds up surfaces driven by intention and chance, deliberation and inspiration. His paintings contain impressions, not only of normative tools like pencil and brush, but also of the things in his immediate environment. The flow between paintings and ideas can be sequential or non-sequential, direct or disjunctive; Connors employs a poetic calculus in which two unlike things come together to create a third—one ripe with possibilities for consideration, combination and exploration.

Also at play in these works is an interest in the idea of color in space as well as that of painting in space. Sometimes this means physical extension off the wall; for this show, Connors comes back to the traditional easel-painting format. The works in his Bottoms group employ an off-center visual grid. There is a sense of implicit movement—of folding—in these works; the sense of space being flipped over or inverted. Connors comments that this grid allows him to explore a more intense seriality than he has tried in the past, one in which he can really play with the dynamics of color. The reference to sexual dynamics is humorous and apt; a cross-over of meanings that suggests our own conflated expectations when creating, consuming and interpreting art objects and the world around us.

This is Matt Connors’s third solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin. Recent solo and group exhibitions include MoMA (New York, NY); MoMA PS1 (New York, NY); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Contemporary Art Museum (Houston, TX); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf, Germany) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (Bonn, Germany). Connors’s art has been written about in Art in America, The New York Times, Art + Auction, Kaleidoscope, ArtForum, Frieze and many other publications. Connors has long been interested in ephemera and book practice. Catalogs include: Matt Connors: Machines (Rainoff Books, 2014); A Bell is a Cup: Matt Connors (Rainoff Books, 2012); Matt Connors: Gas... Telephone... One Hundred Thousand Rubles (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2011); and Matt Connors: Line Breaks (VeneKlasen Werner, 2011). Connors lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.