Matt Saunders Exhibition Opens at St. Louis Art Museum
New work by the multimedia artist will be on display in Galleries 249 and 250 from Nov. 17 to Feb. 4, 2018.
The Saint Louis Art Museum will present new work by Matt Saunders in the 114th installment of the museum's popular Currents series. The free exhibition will be on view in Galleries 249 and 250 from Nov. 17 through Feb. 4, 2018.
Saunders works across a variety of media to challenge the boundaries of painting, printmaking, photography and animation. Drawing on source material from avant-garde films to found photographs and using his own invented techniques, the American artist investigates the ways that images are repeated, altered and distorted over time.
Saunders produces his photographic works without a camera, instead passing light through oil paint on linen or varieties of ink on plastic to create images of luminosity and sharp materiality. His animated films—shown on canvas-like screens—exist at the intersection between choreographed painting and the moving image, anchoring his art in cinematic space and time.
In Currents 114: Matt Saunders, the artist presents interrelated works conceived specifically for this exhibition, including monumental copper-plate etchings, oil paintings on chiffon and photograms. The exhibition also features an animation video installation that will play across multiple screens and weave through two galleries.
Saunders who is based in Berlin and Cambridge, Mass., has had solo shows at the Renaissance Society of America in Chicago and the Tate Liverpool and his work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Aspen Art Museum, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is assistant professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Berlin.
Currents 114: Matt Saunders is curated by Hannah Klemm, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art, with Molly Moog, research assistant.
The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation's leading comprehensive art museums with collections that include works of art of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art.