Matt Connors
Born in Chicago, 1973 and lives in New York, USA
Acknowledging the influence of Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera, and Henri Matisse, Matt Connors also draws from language, music, and design to create paintings that seem simultaneously familiar and new. Foil (2011) for instance, evokes the crescent shapes and primary colors of Joan Miró, but with a confounding haziness described by one critic in Artforum as “somewhere between a bumpy sfumato and the signature spray of graffiti.” Using mostly raw canvases, Connors also produces Color Field-like works by pouring layers of paint into fabric like dye, or imprinting one wet canvas onto another. Clear modern influences notwithstanding, Connors describes his modestly scaled practice as “a kind of inward progression so that materials, processes, the studio, and my own actions have all started to qualify for me as origin points in and of themselves.”