ROB MATTHEWS "Everything is a Nail"

This fall David Lusk Gallery Nashville presents Rob Matthews’ Everything is a Nail, an exhibition featuring work addressed in both his previous show in Nashville dawn-watchers watch and Peace Like a Fever, exhibited at the Memphis gallery in March 2018.

These new paintings examine current upheaval with a longer historical view and considers conflict in Syria and other issues in the Middle East, the southern U.S.-Mexico border, Sub-Saharan and Saharan Africa. Some works hint at strategy, wagering and blind luck while others focus on utopia and dystopia, observation and historical and biblical accounts. Bold patterns, bright primary colors, geometric structures and linear frames embrace formal art history techniques and nod to art history greats such as Mondrian and Gorky.

“Themes of upheaval, power, displacement and the unspoken message of “home” anchor the work,” Matthews says. “Some subjects of these paintings are heroes. Other subjects are villains. The remaining that are depicted are caught in the middle. All of the work is made to spend time considering events and people that get lost in the shuffle of the ever-changing news cycle.”

Matthews lives and works in Nashville. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and his BFA in painting from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is a two-time award winner of the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship award and won the Pew Fellowship in the Arts award in 2009. His work is frequently exhibited in New York, Philadelphia and Nashville and is in the Collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of the Arts, the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts and the de Young Museum.